Now Is the Accepted Time

You have a list of things you will do once life settles down. Deal with the drinking. Forgive your father. Actually pray rather than intending to. The list is not lazy; every item on it is sincere. It is also several years old and nothing has moved.

Paul is quoting Isaiah when he writes this, and the original is spoken to the Servant: I have heard thee in a time accepted, and in the day of salvation have I succoured thee. He takes a promise made to one and turns it on the people in front of him, and then he says now twice in a single breath, which nobody does unless a door can close. And look where the sentence sits. The whole verse is a parenthesis. He has just begged them not to receive the grace of God in vain, breaks off mid-argument to say behold, now, and then picks the sentence back up on the other side. The urgency is literally an interruption in his own paragraph. Which is the thing worth carrying out of this. Scripture never anywhere offers you a calmer season in which to respond. It offers this one, which is inconvenient, and unfinished, and the only one in your hands. Every future version of you that would find it easier is a person who does not exist, and the waiting itself has already cost more than the doing would have.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 358 is Keep the Door (Psalm 141:3).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna