Daily Manna · Day 198 · July 17
Revived in Trouble
“Though I walk in the midst of trouble, thou wilt revive me: thou shalt stretch forth thine hand against the wrath of mine enemies, and thy right hand shall save me.”
On the evening of 6 June 1882, George Matheson was alone in the manse at Innellan, a village on the Firth of Clyde in Scotland, where he was the parish minister. He had been blind since his student years, and that day his sister had been married. He wrote later that something had happened to him which was known only to himself, and which caused him the most severe mental suffering. Out of that evening came the hymn "O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go." He said it took about five minutes, that it came as though someone were dictating it to him, and that he never changed a line of it.
The words people still sing are the ones that stay inside the trouble: "I trace the rainbow through the rain." Matheson does not say after the rain. He says through it, while it is still coming down, and that describes what can really be seen in the middle of a storm.
The psalm works the same way: "Though I walk in the midst of trouble, thou wilt revive me." David is still walking in the middle of the trouble when God revives him. "Revive" is a strong verb. It comes from the Hebrew word for "live," and it means to make alive. It is used of bringing back someone who is exhausted, and of God keeping a person alive, so it assumes something has been drained out of him. Then two hands do two different jobs in one sentence. One is stretched out "against the wrath of mine enemies," and the other, the right hand, saves. The psalm ends by saying why any of this holds: "The LORD will perfect that which concerneth me." God finishes what He has started in this man's life. He does not promise an easy road, but He does promise never to abandon the road He has put him on.
So go back to the manse and the man sitting in it, in a grief he would only ever describe as known to himself. Nothing about his situation changed that evening. He was still blind the next morning, and the private suffering was still private. What he was given was five minutes of being made alive in the middle of it, and people are still singing what came out of those minutes well over a century later. That is what reviving looks like. God may not stop the rain, and He still makes you alive while you walk through it.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 198 is Being Alone (James 2:17).