Shield and Lifter

What does shame do to a body?

It bends the neck. You come into the building with your eyes on the floor, not out of humility but because of the thing people know, and the way conversation changes pitch when you walk through a door.

There is a kind of shame that is not the shame of being wrongly accused, and it is worse to carry. It is the kind where the thing is true, and known, and yours, and no amount of elapsed time has made it any less true. A man who has genuinely been forgiven for it can still come into a room with his eyes down, because forgiveness settles the account and does not, by itself, lift a head.

The psalm comes from a comparable position. Its writer is running from his own son, with half the country saying aloud that God is finished with him; he quotes them in the verse before: many there be which say of my soul, There is no help for him in God. He does not argue the point and produces no evidence to the contrary. He says three things instead. Thou art a shield for me. My glory, which is the exact opposite of what is being said about him. And the lifter up of mine head. That last one is the tender one, and the grammar is the mercy in it: he is not told to straighten up. God does the lifting.

So look one person in the eye today. The one you have been avoiding in the corridor will do. You are not defending your reputation in that moment. You are letting somebody else hold your head up.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 223 is The Race and the Crown (1 Corinthians 9:24).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna