Daily Manna · Day 20 · January 20
Good to Those Who Wait
“The LORD is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him.”
What does a man sitting in ash have to say about the goodness of God?
Ash is the setting of the whole poem. Lamentations is written over a burned city, and the man writing it says, near the top of this same chapter, that God has hedged him in and shut out his prayer (3:7-8). He never withdraws that. He does not go back and soften it. He sets this line down beside it, in the ash, without sweeping the ash away first: the LORD is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him. The next verse says the waiting should be quiet, and hopeful, and it names no date. Ash does not come with a date.
What is handed to you in the ash is not a schedule but a character. Not a claim about when, but a claim about who. And ash turns out to be the only place where you can find out whether that is enough, because everything else you might have believed about God has already burned off.
You stopped telling people what you are waiting for. Leave it unsaid a while longer, but for a different reason than before. Sit somewhere for five minutes and do not fill them. No request, no explaining yourself, no rehearsing the wait. Say nothing at all.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 20 is Alpha and Omega (Revelation 1:8).