Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 36 · February 5
Create in Me
“Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.”
It is the morning after. Somebody sits on the edge of the bed with a phone in one hand, having drafted an apology three times, and the third draft is better written than the first two, which is the part that frightens him.
We know this floor. We have all cleaned something up and been quietly impressed with the cleaning. And the dread underneath it is never really about being found out. It is the suspicion that we are the kind of person who does this, and that the apology is a skill we have been developing.
David is not asking to be tidied. Create in me a clean heart, O God.
Create is bara, a verb that never takes a human subject in the Hebrew Bible. It is the word in the first line of Genesis, In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. He has looked at what he is, concluded that nothing short of the making verb will do, and knows he cannot be the one who uses it.
The second half is quieter and no smaller: renew a right spirit within me. Renew is a repair word, ongoing and unglamorous. He asks for a creation and a maintenance in one breath.
There is real fear in the next line and we should not skip it. Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me. David had watched that happen to a king, and knows what a man looks like after the Spirit of the LORD has departed from him, because he used to play the harp for him.
Father, we have written better apologies than we have lived. Do not accept the drafts. Make in us what is not there, because we have proved we cannot manufacture it, and we would rather be remade than well spoken of. Do not take your Spirit from us. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, and it is all we have brought.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 36 is Blotted Out (Isaiah 44:22).