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 not rhetorical if you are inside one. The clock says seven hours. Grief says otherwise, and grief is not lying to you when it says the room feels permanent. That is honestly how it looks from in there, and no verse cancels the feeling by being true.
The psalm does not hurry, and it has a famous half and a half nobody quotes. Weeping may endure for a night is the famous one. The skipped one is that God's anger is in this verse at all. The psalm does not deny it, it measures it: a moment of anger, set against a favour that is life itself. And the verb behind endure is the word for lodging, for spending the night as a guest with a bed made up. Weeping is not loitering outside your door. It has been given a room, and it will keep it until light.
Nothing here asks you to stop crying by lunchtime. It says the night has an end and the hour of that end was not set by you. That is thinner comfort than the kind people offer at funerals. It is also the only kind that survives contact with the actual night.
So pray it as it is, without improving it.
God, I cannot be glad tonight and I am not going to perform it 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 that 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).