Enduring Mercy

We are bad at gratitude on the days we need it, and we know it, because a list made at bedtime out of a good day is not thanks; it is bookkeeping, and it collapses the moment the day is bad.

The psalm does not ask for that. It asks for something much more specific, and it shows you what it wants by doing it four times. Some wandered in a wilderness and found no city to dwell in. Some sat in darkness in irons. Some were fools and afflicted because of their own iniquity, which the psalm says out flat. And some went down to the sea in ships, and their soul melted because of trouble, and they reeled to and fro and staggered like a drunken man, and were at their wits end. Four groups. Four disasters, one of them entirely self-inflicted. And after each one the same turn, in almost the same words: then they cried unto the LORD in their trouble, and he delivered them out of their distresses; oh that men would praise the LORD for his goodness.

That is what the opening line is asking for. Not a mood. Testimony, from the particular hole you were in. Verse two says it plainly: let the redeemed of the LORD say so. Say so, meaning out where somebody hears it.

So the psalm leaves a space in it, and nobody is going to check whether you fill it. You know which of the four you were in, and if it was the third, the psalm has already said the word so that you do not have to. Somewhere in your house or on the end of a phone is a person who has never heard where you were, what you cried, or what came of it. That telling is open to you whenever you are ready for it, and mercy enduring for ever is the thing that makes the story safe to tell at all.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 313 is Lay Down Our Lives (1 John 3:16).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna