Forgiveness and Healing

A pill organiser on a counter with more compartments than it had last year. A printed result read four times over, looking for a different sentence. And somewhere in the same house, not written down anywhere, a second file with your own name and your own failures in it.

Two lists, one kitchen. The psalm puts them in one breath: Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases.

It matters that these are two clauses of a single sentence, because we handle them very differently and the psalm does not. The forgiveness you can bank on now, and the psalm spends the following verses saying how far off it puts the sin. The healing is sung as praise rather than issued as a receipt, and the people who sang this still buried their dead; the same singer says a few lines later that our days are as grass. What the verse refuses is a different idea altogether: that either list lies outside God's reach, or that one of them is the spiritual one and the other is somebody else's department.

So bring both into the room and then stop talking. Set the prescription beside the confession, say nothing about either for two minutes, and do not organise them into a request. He is not confused about which is which.

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