Daily Manna · Day 233 · August 21
Good Tidings to the Meek
“The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn;”
You keep the hard part of your life in a compartment nobody is allowed to open. At work you are competent. At church you are fine, thanks for asking. The grief, the debt, the thing happening in your marriage: all of it filed under not now.
In 1813 a Quaker woman named Elizabeth Fry walked into the women's side of Newgate prison in London. Three hundred women and their children in two wards and two cells, sleeping on straw, some untried, some waiting to be transported, some waiting to hang. The governor advised her not to go in. She went in, and the first thing she did was not preach; she brought clothing for the babies. Then she started a school inside the prison, taught by one of the prisoners, and read the Bible to women nobody had read to in years. She told a committee of parliament afterwards that she had rarely known those women to be anything but orderly once they were treated as people.
The prison reformers worked straight out of this passage, and the reason is easy to see. Look at the list Isaiah's anointed man is sent to: the meek, the brokenhearted, the captives, them that are bound, all that mourn. Not one respectable category among them. And Jesus read this aloud in the synagogue at Nazareth, stopping short of the line about the day of vengeance, closed the book, and said This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.
So the promise is more specific than a general kindness. He did not come for the version of you that has it together, and that version has never existed. The opening of the prison in that sentence was not a metaphor for feeling better, and Fry's women found that out in a literal building. The compartment you have filed under not now is the address he gave when he said where he was sent.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 233 is If Thou Shouldest Mark (Psalm 130:3).