Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 312 · November 8
Born for Adversity
“A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.”
A hospital car park at half past eleven at night, and somebody who has driven ninety minutes is sitting in the passenger seat with the engine off, holding a paper cup from a machine, saying nothing useful.
A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity. Two lines, and Hebrew proverbs commonly run the second as a restatement of the first, which would make this one person: the friend whose loving at all times turns out, on a night like that, to be the brother born for it. Read as two people, it names a pair. Either way there are two of you reading it.
One of you has somebody like that and has never once used them. You would drive the ninety minutes for anybody on your list, and you have arranged things so that nobody has to drive it for you, and you would call that consideration. Proverbs is blunter: A man that hath friends must shew himself friendly. It runs both ways, or the arrangement is service, and service can be withdrawn without anybody noticing what went.
The other one of you did that arithmetic at eleven o'clock one night and could not produce a name. Proverbs will not sentimentalise it either. It knows how these things break: A brother offended is harder to be won than a strong city. And it says the unromantic thing about geography: better is a neighbour that is near than a brother far off.
So, a word to both of you, and it goes in opposite directions. You who have never let anybody sit with you: the arrangement is yours, you built it, and it will hold until you take it apart. And you who could not produce a name last night: God is entirely capable of putting you in a car park at half past eleven for a person you have not met yet, and calling that your appointment. At all times covers the years before the friendship starts.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 312 is The Character of Love (1 Corinthians 13:4-5).