Daily Manna · Day 5 · January 5
Drawn
“The LORD hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.”
The people who first heard this sentence were survivors of a massacre, living hundreds of miles from home, on land that was not theirs.
Jeremiah says so plainly one verse earlier: the people which were left of the sword found grace in the wilderness. That is the address on the envelope. Not a settled congregation. Deportees, in the country that had burned their temple, being told that God had loved them with an everlasting love. Everlasting runs backward as well as forward, which puts the love earlier than the siege, earlier than the idolatry, earlier than the sword. Then there is the verb. Drawn, not dragged. Kindness pulls, and pulling is slower than hauling and much harder to resist. Read on and the exile still stands at seventy years (29:10). Being loved did not cancel the consequence. It changed who was waiting at the far end of it.
You may have a room and a date of your own where you decided the love had ended. It was older than that room before you walked into it.
Do not respond to this. Do not resolve it, do not write it down, do not turn it into a plan. Stop where you are for two minutes and say nothing at all.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 5 is Truth in Love (Ephesians 4:15).