Forgiveness and Healing

On the kitchen counter there is a pill organiser with more sections than it had last year. Beside it lies a printed test result you have read four times, hoping to find a different sentence. And somewhere in the same house, never written down, there is a second file with your own name on it and your own failures in it.

So there are two lists in one kitchen, and the psalm puts them in one breath: "Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases."

It matters that these are two halves of a single sentence. We handle them very differently, and the psalm does not. The forgiveness you can count on now. Later the psalm says, "As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us." The healing is sung as praise, and it is not handed out like a receipt. The people who sang this still buried their dead, and the same psalm says, "As for man, his days are as grass." What the verse rejects is a different idea altogether. It rejects the idea that either list is out of God's reach. It also rejects the idea that one list is spiritual and the other belongs to somebody else's department.

So bring both lists to Him today, and then stop talking. Set the prescription beside the confession, and for two minutes say nothing about either. Do not turn them into a request. The Lord knows which is which, and both are in His hands.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 225 is Grace That Teaches (Titus 2:11-12).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna