Daily Manna · Day 184 · July 3
Gracious and Compassionate
“The LORD is gracious, and full of compassion; slow to anger, and of great mercy.”
Somebody standing outside a door they have knocked on before, rehearsing the apology once more in case this is the time it is not accepted.
That is where a great deal of praying happens, and it carries a grief of its own, quieter than bereavement and much harder to describe to anyone. Not the sin. The wear of it. The years of coming back with the same thing, and the private certainty that a record is being kept and will one day be read back to you in order.
The psalm does not argue with that and does not hurry it. It says four things and lets them stand. Gracious, giving what nobody earned. Full of compassion, a word built in Hebrew from the word for a womb: the ache of a parent, not the finding of a judge. Slow to anger, literally long of nostrils, an idiom for a long fuse. And of great mercy, chesed, the loyalty that holds after every reason for withdrawing it. The line is quoted, too. God first said it about himself, to Moses, and he said it not before the golden calf but after it.
So there is nothing to do tonight. These are not moods he is in. They are what he is, and nothing you have done alters them. The door was never being held shut.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 184 is Shall He Live Again (Job 14:14).