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 can a man sitting in ashes say about the goodness of God?
Ashes are the setting of this whole poem. Lamentations was written over Jerusalem after it was burned. Near the top of this same chapter the writer says God has hedged him in and shut out his prayer: "Also when I cry and shout, he shutteth out my prayer" (3:8). He never takes that back or softens it. Instead, he sets today's line down right beside it, in the ashes, without sweeping them 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 full of hope and quiet. It names no date, because grief like his does not come with a date.
So what he is given in the ashes is a Person rather than a schedule: the verse tells him who God is and says nothing about when. And the ashes turn out to be the one place where he can find out whether that is enough, because everything else he once believed about God has already burned away. What is left standing is this: the Lord is good to the one who waits for Him.
Maybe you have stopped telling people what you are waiting for. You can leave it unsaid a while longer, but now for a different reason. Sit somewhere for five minutes and do not fill them. Make no request, offer no explanation, and do not go over the waiting again. Just be quiet before Him, and let the One who is good to those who wait be good to you.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 20 is Alpha and Omega (Revelation 1:8).