Daily Manna · Day 90 · March 31
Merciful and Faithful
“(For the LORD thy God is a merciful God;) he will not forsake thee, neither destroy thee, nor forget the covenant of thy fathers which he sware unto them.”
We have all been more afraid of the walk back through the door than of anything that happened outside it. The leaving was reasonable at every single step. It is the returning, with people knowing where we have been, that we cannot make ourselves do.
Trees do this without embarrassment. An oak drops everything it has, stands bare through a season that from the outside looks exactly like death, and then does not have to explain itself in April. Nobody asks the tree where it has been. The sap runs back up because the root never left, and the leafing out is not an achievement; it is what happens when the root is still in the ground and the light comes back.
Moses says this sentence on the far side of a warning, and the warning is grim. He has just told Israel exactly what the idols will cost: scattered among the nations, left few in number, serving gods of wood and stone that neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell. And from there, from the scattering, the offer. But if from thence thou shalt seek the LORD thy God, thou shalt find him, if thou seek him with all thy heart and with all thy soul. From thence. Not after you get home. From wherever the scattering put you. And then the parenthesis, which reads like something added because it could not be left unsaid: for the LORD thy God is a merciful God; he will not forsake thee, neither destroy thee, nor forget the covenant. But the promise is fastened to seeking, and the price named is the whole heart. Half is not a smaller version of it. It is a different thing.
God, we did not stop believing. We stopped speaking, and the silence got comfortable faster than we expected, and now the door feels heavier than the leaving ever did. You said from thence, so we are speaking from here, which is where we actually are and not where we would prefer to be found. Take the part we have been holding back. We are not asking you to make the walk back easy. We are asking you to be at the other end of it, and you have said you would be. Amen.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 90 is The Letter He Meant (Jude 1:3).