Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 227 · August 15
If Ye Will Hear
“For he is our God; and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand. To day if ye will hear his voice,”
Nothing has been said to you for a long time. You would take a word today if one came, you have asked for one more than once, and you have stopped raising it with other people because of how that conversation goes.
Somebody else is reading this with the opposite problem. They know exactly what was said, could write it on a card from memory, and have spent two years managing the date on which they will act. Psalm 95 has both of you in it, and it breaks in half in the middle of a verse to reach the second one.
The first six verses are a congregation talking about God. O come, let us sing unto the LORD, it starts, and five verses later, O come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the LORD our maker. Then, halfway through verse seven, the speaker changes and God is the one talking. To day if ye will hear his voice, Harden not your heart, as in the provocation, and as in the day of temptation in the wilderness. Provocation and temptation are place names, Meribah and Massah, where a people asked whether the LORD was among them or not while drinking water he had just given them out of a rock. The warning goes to the generation with the most evidence: When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my work.
The two of us pray it from opposite ends. To one of us you have been silent, and we would rather bring that to you than to anybody else, without dressing it up as patience. The other one heard you clearly and has been running a diary against you ever since. Speak, where there has been nothing for years. And where there has already been speech, take the postponing out of us before it sets, because forty years long was I grieved is how long it ran the last time. Amen.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 227 is Prayer Not Turned Away (Psalm 66:20).