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.”
Maybe you have been praying while holding something back, and the words seem to stop at the ceiling. For weeks now you have wondered whether you were only talking to yourself.
Two kinds of people feel that way, and they need opposite answers, because the ceiling is not always the same ceiling.
The first kind is Job, or someone like him. The silence has no cause anyone can find, and there is nothing underneath it to fix. A great deal of the Bible is written from that place, and in Job's story it was the advice of his friends that made it worse.
The second kind is the man who wrote Psalm 66. Two verses before today's verse he names his own case: "If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me." To regard something here is to look at it with approval, to treasure it and keep it. He does not mean the sin you are fighting against. He means the one you have decided to keep. He knew exactly what would have closed the line to God, and that is why the psalm ends in amazement: "But verily God hath heard me."
Only you can tell which of the two you are, and nobody else has the right to decide it for you.
So go back to the ceiling. If yours is the first kind, it is not a lid that shuts God out. Earlier in this psalm the people say, "we went through fire and through water: but thou broughtest us out into a wealthy place," and none of them could see that while they were still in the fire. If yours is the second kind, then the ceiling is not above you at all. It is the thing in your own hands, held up in front of your face, and it comes down the moment you put it down. Either way, this psalm ends by praising a God "which hath not turned away my prayer, nor his mercy from me."
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 227 is If Ye Will Hear (Psalm 95:7).