Hope Deferred

We stopped saying it out loud somewhere in the second year, and called that being realistic. The prayer got shorter. Then it got general. Now it is a sentence we can say without our voice doing anything.

Proverbs does not call that unbelief. It calls it an illness. Hope deferred maketh the heart sick, and the word behind sick is the ordinary word for being ill, used of a body gone weak. Deferred is not denied; it is drawn out, held off, still open. The book files a long wait alongside its other observations about how bodies and money and households behave, and attaches no blame to the heart that got sick doing it.

So bring the thing itself, in the words you had before you trimmed them. God, it has been this long. You know the request and how tired we are of making it. We have got skilled at wanting it less. The proverb says the other half of this is a tree of life, the biggest picture the book owns, and the phrase the last chapter of the Bible gives to a tree in the middle of the city with leaves for the healing of the nations. Do it, if you will do it. And if the answer is a longer wait, keep us from calling the sickness a fault.

The proverb never promises you the second half. See how carefully it is worded: it describes what a deferred hope does to a person, and what an arriving one does, and says nothing about which of the two is coming to your house. What it hands you is a name for the condition you are in, and the name is not sin.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 268 is The Father of Comfort (2 Corinthians 1:3-4).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two