Daily Manna · Day 55 · February 24
Comforted Thoughts
“In the multitude of my thoughts within me thy comforts delight my soul.”
Someone once told you, kindly, "Just try not to think about it." It has never once worked.
The man who wrote Psalm 94 was not lying awake over a private worry. Read the whole chapter. He is watching people who "slay the widow and the stranger, and murder the fatherless." They get away with it, and they say, "The LORD shall not see." That is what fills his "multitude of thoughts": a public injustice running loose. His complaint is the oldest one there is: "LORD, how long shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked triumph?"
That changes what verse 19 is doing. It does not promise a quiet mind. Two verses earlier he says, "Unless the LORD had been my help, my soul had almost dwelt in silence." In the very next line he says, "My foot slippeth; thy mercy, O LORD, held me up." So he is in the middle of slipping. The thoughts have not stopped piling up, the injustice has not been put right, and nothing around him has been cleared away. Into all of that he says, "thy comforts delight my soul." The comfort arrives in the middle of the noise, without waiting for the room to go quiet.
So say your loudest thought in one sentence, the way you would say it to a friend, without dressing it up as a prayer. Then read the rest of Psalm 94 slowly, from verse 16 to the end. Notice that even at the end of the chapter the wicked have not yet fallen; he simply trusts that "the LORD our God shall cut them off." His comfort came before his answer did. God has never asked you for a quiet mind as the price of His comfort. He meets you in the multitude of your thoughts.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 55 is Kiss the Son (Psalm 2:12).