Daily Manna · Day 38 · February 7
Family Name
“And will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty.”
A doorway with a threshold in it, and a man standing on the wrong side, talking to someone in the room.
We are good at wanting the room. We quote the Almighty offering to be called Father, and we mean it, and most of us have at some point cried over it, because the voice that shows up when we fail is usually our own father's and it has never once said sit down, you are mine, we will sort this out together. So the promise lands hard and we hold it as a comfort and we stop there.
What we do less often is read the sentence it is attached to. Paul builds this out of Old Testament pieces and the immediate one is a command: come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing, and I will receive you. And will be a Father unto you. The and is doing structural work. Sonship is given, not earned, and it is also entered, and the entering involves leaving something on the other side of a doorway.
We know what ours is. The account still open. The number we still answer. The habit the shape of the week is arranged around. We have separated from nothing and wondered why the Father sounds distant.
So: the man in the doorway, still talking, still not stepping through. The threshold is not a test of whether he is loved. It is just a threshold, and it is roughly four inches high, and the room is warm, and nobody in there is going to come out and carry him over it.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 38 is Aaron Held His Peace (Leviticus 10:3).