Daily Manna · Day 144 · May 24
Joy Comes in the Morning
“For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”
How long is a night?
That is a real question when you are inside one. The clock says seven hours, but grief says something else. Grief is not lying to you when it says this room feels permanent, because that is honestly how it looks from inside. No verse makes the feeling go away just by being true.
Psalm 30 does not hurry you. Today's verse has a famous half and a half almost nobody quotes. "Weeping may endure for a night" is the famous half. The part people skip is that God's anger is in this verse at all: "For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life." David does not deny God's anger. He measures it. The anger lasts a moment, and it is set against a favour that is life itself. Then look at the word "endure" in "weeping may endure for a night." In Hebrew it is the word for lodging, for staying the night as a guest with a bed made up. Weeping is not just hanging around outside your door. It has been given a room, and it will keep that room until the light comes.
Nothing here asks you to stop crying by lunchtime. The verse says the night has an end, and you are not the one who sets the hour. That is thinner comfort than the kind people offer at funerals, yet it is the only kind that holds up through a real night, because it rests on what God has said: "joy cometh in the morning."
So pray it as it is, without dressing it up.
God, I cannot be glad tonight, and I am not going to put on a show for You. The weeping has a room here, and I cannot make it leave early. You say there is a morning. I am not asking to feel it yet. Get me to it. Amen.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 144 is I Found None (Ezekiel 22:30).