Daily Manna · Day 257 · September 14
Gentleness Makes Great
“Thou hast also given me the shield of thy salvation: and thy right hand hath holden me up, and thy gentleness hath made me great.”
You have been handled roughly this week. Some of it you did to somebody else, in the kitchen or on a call, and you can hear it back now if you let yourself.
We are hard on people mostly because we are in a hurry and we think hardness is faster. It usually is, in the short run. It is why we keep choosing it, and why the sharper sentence is out of our mouths before the gentler one has finished forming.
David is not writing from a quiet life. This psalm celebrates deliverance from Saul and it is full of violence: pursuit, enemies falling, a bow of steel broken by his arms. He is adding up what made him what he is, and the inventory starts where you would expect. The shield of thy salvation. Thy right hand hath holden me up. Then the last item, which nobody would have predicted from the first two: thy gentleness hath made me great. The Hebrew carries the sense of God stooping, lowering himself to the size of the person he is dealing with. That is what David says built a king out of a shepherd boy.
And it has not changed method since. The patience being spent on you this morning, in the place where you know you are still bad at this, is the same patience that made him.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 257 is Him That Hath No Helper (Psalm 72:12).