Known Completely

There is a side of you that only one other Person has ever met.

It runs in the background while you make your coffee: the inner commentary, the resentment you would never say out loud, the thought you pushed away in the middle of the night. Psalm 139 walks straight through all of it, like a list. Read the verbs in order, because the order is the point. "Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off." Then: "Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways."

There are four verbs, and they are not equal, on purpose. "Knowest" is a plain fact, and it covers the two most ordinary things a body does, sitting down and getting up. "Understandest" goes further than knowing, and "afar off" means God understands a thought before it has come close enough for you to name it yourself. "Compassest" translates a Hebrew word for winnowing, the sifting of grain. That seems a strange thing to say about a path until you see that David is describing a God who sorts and examines. Then the last verb lowers its voice: "acquainted." It means being familiar with someone and used to their ways, the way you are with a person you have known for forty years. It has nothing to do with spying or keeping a file.

So the list is built with care. It climbs up to close inspection and then lands in close familiarity, and both are said about the same God in the same breath.

May you be spared the tiring work of managing what has never been hidden from Him. May that side of you that only He has met turn out to be the side He has been acquainted with all along. And may you stop trimming your prayers before you say them, because the One who knows you best is also your oldest friend.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 308 is Let a Man Examine (1 Corinthians 11:28).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna