Daily Manna · Day 299 · October 26
Eyes and Ears Toward You
“For the eyes of the Lord are over the righteous, and his ears are open unto their prayers: but the face of the Lord is against them that do evil.”
You have been praying into a stairwell. The words go up, nothing comes back, and after a while the suspicion arrives that the line was never connected at the far end.
Peter is quoting a psalm here, word for word, and he keeps the whole quotation rather than the comfortable half. The eyes of the Lord are over the righteous, and his ears are open unto their prayers. Then, in the same sentence: but the face of the Lord is against them that do evil. It is one God and one kind of attention, pointed in two directions. Being closely watched is good news or bad news depending entirely on which way you are facing.
And read what Peter has just finished saying, because he does not leave the terms abstract. The verses before this are about not rendering evil for evil, about seeking peace and pursuing it, about refraining the tongue from evil. That is the righteousness in view. Not a spiritual grade. The ordinary business of how you have been treating the people who annoy you.
So before anything else, there is an invitation here rather than an instruction, and you can decline it. You are welcome to bring the thing you have not been bringing: not the request, but the practice you know about, the one you have quietly filed as separate from your prayer life. Peter's sentence suggests it was never filed separately at his end. The ears are open. The invitation is to come the whole way in.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 299 is Set Before You (Deuteronomy 30:19).