The notebook · July 31, 2026

The Verse I Skip

I know Psalm 103 by heart, or nearly. I open it often in the morning. And for months now, without ever deciding to, I have been skipping the same line.

The beginning I take gladly: “Praise the Lord, my soul, and don’t forget all his benefits.” The next verse starts well too — “who forgives all your sins.” There I agree, I can testify to it. Then comes the second half: “who heals all your diseases.” And my eye slides past.

It took me a long time to notice I was doing it. You don’t notice what you avoid; that is precisely the talent of avoidance. What alerted me was the rhythm: I was reading this psalm faster than the others, the way you quicken your step past a door.

The reason is no mystery. I prayed for someone who did not get better. For a long time, carefully, with words I believed were right. He did not get better. So “all your diseases” does not strike me as consoling, it strikes me as false, and I have no wish to say something false in front of God. Skipping the line was still a way of keeping the psalm whole — not a way of lying. A way of not breaking what was left.

What I did not know how to do was stop on it without resolving it. I thought I had to choose: either the verse is true and my grief does not count, or my grief is true and the verse is a lovely sentence. This week I read it whole, out loud, and I concluded nothing. I simply left them both in the same room. It was uncomfortable and it repaired nothing.

But something shifted. I no longer feel I am praying an abridged version. I still do not know what “all your diseases” means — I suspect it holds on a scale of time that is not mine, and that answer does not satisfy me. It satisfies me enough, though, to stop looking away.

Now I wonder how many other lines I skip without seeing it.

In Manna the verse arrives without my having chosen it. Sometimes it is exactly the one I would have avoided.