Daily Manna · Day 126 · May 6
As Your Soul Prospers
“Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.”
Picture the letter itself. Third John is so short that it would have fit on one sheet of papyrus, about the size of a page, which was the normal length of an ordinary letter in the Roman world. It is not a long book. It is a note carried by hand from a man who calls himself "the elder" to his friend Gaius, at a time when things had gone wrong in a church.
Further down, John names the trouble. A man called Diotrephes, in the church John had written to, "loveth to have the preeminence among them." He will not welcome the travelling brothers, he stops the people who would welcome them, and he "casteth them out of the church." Gaius is doing the opposite. John praises him because "thou doest faithfully whatsoever thou doest to the brethren, and to strangers." So while one man has closed his door, Gaius keeps his door open. That is the setting for the greeting near the start of the letter: "Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth."
Wishing a friend good health was the ordinary way to open a Greek letter. Everybody did it. John keeps the custom, but he adds a measuring stick, and it runs the opposite way from ours. He never asks Gaius's soul to catch up to his body. He says the soul is the part that is already doing well, and he wants the rest of Gaius's life to come up to that level. John is not looking down on the body. He is telling a faithful man, in a troubled time, that he sees him clearly, and that the healthiest part of him is his soul.
So pray it, in these words or your own. Father, You can see the part of me that nobody asks about. Make it prosper. Where I have given more care to my health, my work and my house than to my soul, turn me back, and let the rest of my life follow where my soul is going with You. And for anyone I know who keeps a door open when it costs them something, do the same for them. Let them find out today that somebody noticed. Amen.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 126 is Try My Reins (Psalm 26:2).