Daily Manna · Day 180 · June 29
Out of the Pit
“I waited patiently for the LORD; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry. He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.”
Six months in, the praying sounds thinner than it did in the first week, and the honest objection is that patience only looks like a virtue once it has worked. I waited patiently for the LORD reads well from the far side of the wait. From inside one it sounds like a man who already knows the ending being congratulated for it.
So take a man who did not know the ending. Adoniram Judson reached Burma in 1813 and worked the better part of six years before a single Burmese person was baptised. Years later he spent something close to a year and a half in prison, part of it in irons, and his wife died not long after he came out. He went on translating the Bible into Burmese. He was not being held up by knowing how it would finish, because he did not know, and the years in which he did not know are the only ones he was ever actually alive in.
And the psalm is more honest than its reputation. The Hebrew of the first line is doubled, waiting I waited, which is how the language says a thing went on and on. Then the verbs arrive and every one of them is God's. He inclined unto me, which is the word for bending down toward somebody. He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay. The clay is the point: it is not a hole with a floor, it is the kind of ground where every attempt to stand puts you deeper. Nobody climbs out of miry clay. Then, after that, set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings, which is the half people forget. Rescue came first and footing came after, and the footing had to be built.
So, a blessing over you while it is still going on. May the God who bends down hear the thing you have stopped putting into words. May he set your feet on ground that does not move, and steady the walking afterward. And through the years whose ending you cannot see, may somebody find you still at the work you were handed, turning one more page into a language nobody has asked you for yet.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 180 is Knowing Him (Philippians 3:10).