Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 193 · July 12
Seek His Face
“Seek the LORD, and his strength: seek his face evermore.”
Most of your seeking has been done in emergencies, and there is no shame in that, because the emergencies were real. The pattern is worth admitting anyway. We seek hard for a fortnight after something frightens us, the seeking tapers off in exact proportion to how much better things get, and we call the tapering peace.
Seek the LORD, and his strength: seek his face evermore sits inside a psalm that is doing nothing but remembering. Psalm 105 recites Abraham, Joseph in irons, the plagues, the sea, the whole file of what has already been done. The instruction to keep seeking is planted in the middle of that. The same line stands in David's psalm on the day the ark came into Jerusalem, and there the last word is different: seek his face continually. Evermore and continually are two attempts at one complaint, and the complaint is against occasional seeking. The shortest answer to it is elsewhere in the Psalms: When thou saidst, Seek ye my face; my heart said unto thee, Thy face, LORD, will I seek.
Our seeking has been of your hand more often than your face, Lord, and it has generally had a deadline on it. We are not asking to be made to feel guilty about it. Make the seeking continual instead. Set us looking for you on the ordinary days, the ones with nothing wrong in them, when there is nothing at stake at all except knowing you. Amen.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 193 is Law Written on Hearts (Jeremiah 31:33).