Daily Manna · Day 214 · August 2
Here I Am
“Then shalt thou call, and the LORD shall answer; thou shalt cry, and he shall say, Here I am.”
The objection is honest, so let it be said: you have prayed about the same thing for months and heard nothing, and being told there is a reason for the silence feels like being blamed for it.
But a confession has to come with it, and it belongs to all of us. We are very good at the religious half. We fast, or we do our version of fasting, we keep the disciplines, and we are also short with the people who work for us, we repeat the rumour, we arrange our money so somebody else absorbs the loss. Isaiah 58 is God explaining to people exactly like us why heaven has gone quiet. They ask it plainly: wherefore have we fasted, and thou seest not? And he answers just as plainly: behold, in the day of your fast ye find pleasure, and exact all your labours. Ye fast for strife and debate.
The instruction that follows is physical in every item: loose the bands of wickedness, undo the heavy burdens, let the oppressed go free, deal thy bread to the hungry, bring the poor that are cast out to thy house. And then the word the promise hangs from. Then shalt thou call, and the LORD shall answer; thou shalt cry, and he shall say, Here I am.
Read past the promise, too, because the same sentence keeps going and names the putting forth of the finger, and speaking vanity. There is a hinge on both sides of it.
Which is the truth, and it flatters nobody here, myself included. God's silence is not always an absence. Sometimes it is the same voice, still on the subject we changed.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 214 is Singers Before the Army (2 Chronicles 20:21).