Keep the Door

We each know the sentence we should not have said, and we know how little warning we got before it was out. There was a half second, and then the room was different.

The request is architectural. A watch is a posted guard, a door has a keeper who decides what goes through it, and both put the control outside the man asking. What he wants is somebody else standing in the doorway. Look at what surrounds the request, because the psalm knows the mouth is downstream of something. A verse earlier, prayer goes up like incense and hands are lifted like the evening sacrifice. The verse after names the source: Incline not my heart to any evil thing. Then, most awkwardly, he asks to be corrected by other people, and calls it a gift. Let the righteous smite me; it shall be a kindness: and let him reprove me; it shall be an excellent oil. A man asking for a guard on his own mouth is also asking for someone else to be free to tell him the truth about it. Another psalm shows the same man trying the do-it-yourself version: I will keep my mouth with a bridle, while the wicked is before me. That one lasted as long as his patience did, and the psalm reports the failure in the next line.

Set a watch, then, before we open ours tomorrow, because the half second has never been long enough for us. Incline our hearts elsewhere first, since the mouth only carries out what is decided further back. And when the reproof comes from somebody with the standing to give it, let us take it as the oil this psalm calls it and not as an attack. Keep the door. We are not able to keep it ourselves and we have stopped pretending otherwise. Amen.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 358 is Now Is the Accepted Time (2 Corinthians 6:2).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two