According to His Mercy

Water does not have to be earned by the ground.

Stand in a field after a long dry spell and watch what rain does. It falls on the cracked part and on the green part without distinction, and the cracked part takes more of it, and nothing in the field did anything to bring it. That is not sentimentality about weather; it is the plain mechanics of the thing, and it is the picture Paul reaches for. The washing of regeneration is a water word, and regeneration itself is bigger than most people notice: it is the same word Jesus uses for the renewal of the whole world, the remaking of everything. Paul applies the word for a new creation to one person being washed.

And look at what he rules out on the way there. Not by works of righteousness which we have done. He does not say your works were insufficient, which is what a scoreboard would say. He says they were never the currency in the first place, which is a different claim and a harder one to keep believing. Then the two things named are both done to a person rather than by one: washing, and renewing of the Holy Ghost. Nobody washes himself in this sentence.

So pray out of the wrong half of the month, deliberately. On the day you were short with everyone, in the week the reading collapsed, bring the request you had been quietly saving for a better version of yourself. Ask for it in that state, on purpose, because the state was never what gave you the standing to ask.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 314 is A Ransom for Many (Matthew 20:28).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna