Near to All

"The LORD is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth."

There are seasons when that sentence feels like a wall, and you are standing on the wrong side of it. You call, and the room stays an ordinary room. You have not rebelled, and you have not stopped believing. You simply have no evidence for it this week, and the verse seems to go on being true somewhere far away from you.

Notice that the psalm states the condition and then repeats it straight away: "all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth." In Hebrew poetry, saying something twice is a way of underlining it. The word for truth carries the sense of something firm that you can rely on. So the test is whether your calling was honest, and not whether your prayer felt deep enough. That is a smaller thing to ask, and a harder one to do. The psalm also does not soften the other side to make the nearness sweeter. Two verses later it says, "all the wicked will he destroy." Here, God's nearness is His answer to those who call on Him, which makes it more personal than weather that falls on everyone alike.

Still, what the verse reports and what you feel do not match. This is the part people usually leave unsaid in rooms where everyone is supposed to be encouraged. Sometimes the gap lasts for years, and nowhere does the psalm put a date on the nearness.

But honest calling is exactly what the verse asks of you, so pray it as it stands. Lord, You say You are near to all who call on You in truth. Here is the truth. I have called, and I have not found You near. I will not pretend otherwise to make the sentence work. I am calling anyway. Come near, or hold me while I keep calling until You do.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 15 is A Ready Writer (Psalm 45:1).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna