Upheld

A man goes down on the ice in a car park, hard, and the first thing he does is look around to see who saw it. Then he gets up too quickly, waves off the woman coming over, and walks to his car with his hip already tightening.

The verse names two people, and it is worth noticing that it names them separately. The LORD upholdeth all that fall, and raiseth up all those that be bowed down. Falling is sudden. It has a moment attached to it, an hour, a stupid decision you can point to, and its characteristic emotion is shame. Being bowed down is slow. It is the posture of a person under a weight that has been there long enough to change how they stand, and its characteristic emotion is not shame but exhaustion. The Hebrew words are different, and the psalm gives each one its own verb: the fallen are upheld, the bent are raised.

Neither is graded. The psalm does not ask how either of them arrived there, and it does not put a condition on the response. And look where the line sits: this is an acrostic psalm of praise, working through the alphabet listing what God is like, and this is simply one of the entries. Holding up people on the floor is not an emergency measure. It is part of the character being praised, listed between his everlasting kingdom in verse 13 and his feeding of every living thing in verse 15.

Lord, it is the same failure as last time, which is the part that stings, and we had promised ourselves, and we meant it. Some of us fell this week and some of us have been bent for years and cannot remember standing upright. You wrote a verb for each. We are not going to wait until we feel able to get up. Uphold, raise, and let us do the next ordinary thing in front of us while you do it. Amen.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 84 is Whose Decision (Joel 3:14).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna