Daily Manna · Day 152 · June 1
Perfect Peace
“Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee.”
We have turned this verse into a technique, and the technique does not work.
That is the confession, and I am inside it. We treat perfect peace as a state we can enter by concentrating harder, so when the mind wakes before we do and starts the list, we add a second failure to the first. Not only anxious, but bad at the verse.
Look at the words. The song this sits in is sung in a strong city, and the chapters around it are full of the lofty city being laid low. Perfect peace is shalom shalom, the word said twice, which is how Hebrew makes a superlative. And stayed is passive: leaned, propped, held up, which is what you do with a beam that cannot carry itself. Not the mind that concentrates; the mind that has been propped on him, and then the reason, because he trusteth in thee, which puts the weight on what is leaned on rather than on the strength of the grip.
So what we keep confessing as anxiety is often something else. It is the assumption that the propping was our job.
Now stop reading. Be quiet for three minutes without praying, without a verse, without planning the day. If the list starts, let it run past you.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 152 is Walk in It (2 John 1:6).