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.”
Grief can look like this: a chair by a window, the same soft clothes four days in a row, the same three songs, and a plate somebody brought in and took away again.
Grief has its own clothes, and nobody chooses them on purpose. 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. Anybody who tells you to snap out of it has never sat in that chair.
Read the verse slowly. It is a man looking back, 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, rough material made from goat hair and worn against the skin, and it was meant to be uncomfortable. People wore it as the public sign that they were in mourning. Notice that the psalm does not have the man taking it off himself. It is taken off him. Both verbs belong to God. First He loosens the sackcloth, then He ties on gladness like a belt, the way you would dress someone for a feast, or dress someone too weak to dress himself. 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 in it.
So nothing here asks you to be further along than you are. This verse is hindsight, and hindsight only comes later.
There is one thing you may do if you want to, and it does not fake anything. Take off one piece of grief's clothing today. Put different music on in the kitchen. Sit in the other chair. Call back the friend whose calls you have been letting ring out. None of that makes gladness, and none of it is meant to. It only makes room for the One who does the dressing, and it asks nothing of your feelings.
The same psalm says, "weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning." The God who dressed this man in gladness has not changed, and He knows how to do it again.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 201 is Kept and Pondered (Luke 2:19).