Daily Manna · Day 227 · August 15
Prayer Not Turned Away
“Blessed be God, which hath not turned away my prayer, nor his mercy from me.”
You have been praying with something held back, and the words seem to stop at the ceiling. You have wondered these last weeks whether you were talking to yourself the whole time.
Two people are inside that description and they need opposite answers, because it is not always the same ceiling.
The first is Job, or somebody like him: silence with no discoverable cause and nothing at the bottom of it to fix. A great deal of the Bible is written from that position, and the counsel their friends offered is precisely what made it worse.
The second is the man writing Psalm 66, who names his own case two verses before yours. If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me. Regard is the word for looking at with approval, cherishing, keeping. Not the sin you are fighting; the one you have decided to keep. He knows exactly what would have closed the line, which is why the psalm ends in astonishment rather than routine.
Only you can tell which of the two you are, and nobody else has the standing to tell you.
So go back to the ceiling. If it is the first kind, it is not a lid, and the first half of this psalm is a record of a God who took people through fire and through water and brought them out into a wealthy place, none of which they could see at the time. If it is the second, it is not the roof of the room at all. It is the thing in your hands, held up in front of your face, and it comes down the moment you put it down.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 227 is If Ye Will Hear (Psalm 95:7).