Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 143 · May 23
Two Are Better
“Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.”
You are reading this on your own, and one of two things is probably true of you. Either there is nobody nearby who would notice if you fell, or there are a dozen people nearby and not one of them has ever seen you fall.
Ecclesiastes is not being sentimental about friendship, and the lines before this verse show it. "There is one alone, and there is not a second; yea, he hath neither child nor brother: yet is there no end of all his labour." That is a man working himself into the ground for an heir who does not exist. The chapter opened on people who were oppressed, and it says twice in one verse that "they had no comforter." Then it gives the remedy: "Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour." And the reason it gives is falling: "For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up."
So both of you have work to do, though it is different work. If you are the first person, you need to let somebody find you, and that is slow and humbling. If you are the second, you need to let one of those dozen people see you fall, and that may be harder still. Ecclesiastes simply states what the arrangement pays: "a good reward for their labour." Paul names the labour when he tells a church to "bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ." Christ carried the heaviest burden of all for us, and He has given His people to one another. So the reward is a pair of hands close enough to get under you when you fall, and a chance for your hands to do the same for someone else.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 143 is Delivered from Temptation (2 Peter 2:9).