Daily Manna · Day 285 · October 12
Graven on His Palms
“Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me.”
A woman finally gets her child down some hour past midnight and falls asleep in the chair beside the cot, still upright, with one hand through the bars.
That is the picture God reaches for, and then he does something with it that ought to stop you. Can a woman forget her sucking child. The expected answer is no. He gives a different one. Yea, they may forget. He will not use an illustration he cannot fully stand behind, so he concedes the exception, the mother who does forget, the ones for whom that sentence is not a comfort but a wound. Then: yet will I not forget thee.
The city had said it first. Zion said, The LORD hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me. This is the answer to a complaint, not a general reassurance, which is why it comes with evidence. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands. Not written. Cut in, the way a mason cuts, the way a thing is made permanent because ink is not permanent enough. And then the detail that shows what the engraving is: thy walls are continually before me. He is holding the plan of a ruined city in his hands. He is looking at what she will be while she is still rubble.
May the sentence you have been saying about yourself be answered rather than agreed with. May you be held by someone whose memory does not depend on his mood. And may the walls he is looking at turn out to be yours.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 285 is Continue in Prayer (Colossians 4:2).