Daily Manna · Day 201 · July 20
Mourning Turned to Dancing
“Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing: thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness.”
A chair by a window, the same soft clothes four days running, the same three songs, a plate somebody brought in and took away again.
Grief has a wardrobe and nobody chooses it deliberately. You dress for it without deciding to, and after a while the clothes start wearing you. That is not weakness and it is not a failure of faith, and anybody who tells you to snap out of it has not sat in the chair.
Read the verse slowly, because it is a man looking backward and every verb is in the past. Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing: thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness. Sackcloth was real cloth, coarse goat hair worn against the skin, uncomfortable by design, the public sign that somebody was in mourning. And the psalm does not have him taking it off. It has it taken off him. Both verbs belong to God: loosed, then belted, the way you dress somebody for a feast, the way a person too weak to do it is dressed by another. And four verses earlier the same man says thou didst hide thy face, and I was troubled. He does not pretend the dark stretch was short, and he never claims he understood it while he was inside it.
So nothing here asks you to be further along than you are. This is hindsight, and hindsight only becomes available later.
There is one thing you may do if you want to, and it manufactures nothing. Take off one piece of the wardrobe today. Different music in the kitchen. The other chair. The friend you have been letting ring out. None of that produces gladness and none of it is meant to. It only makes room for the one who does the girding, and it asks nothing of your feelings.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 201 is Kept and Pondered (Luke 2:19).