My Morning Starts at Four in the Afternoon

He gets up at half three. Kettle at four. Something cooked at half four because it is his breakfast whatever the clock says, and he eats it while the rest of the street is coming home from work.

Nine years of nights. He is used to it and he does not complain about it and the money is better.

What has crept up on him is not the tiredness. It is a feeling that his whole life happens in the hours nothing is meant to happen in.

Every good thing he has ever been told about God comes with a time attached to it, and the time is always the morning. Early. First light. Before the house wakes. Rising a great while before day. He has heard that in one form or another for twenty years, and every single time it has quietly filed him under the exception, because his early is quarter to four in the afternoon and his midnight is his mid-morning.

He said something about it once, half joking, and somebody said well, God's awake at three too. Which is true and kindly meant and did nothing at all, because it made him a special case being accommodated rather than somebody the thing was ever built for.

That is your kitchen. That is your half four. And I want to speak to that, because there is a line in a psalm that covers the entire turn of the clock and leaves no hours out.

Every hour of the turn

The psalm is about God's name being praised, and it draws a line across the sky to say where and when.

From the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same the Lord's name is to be praised.Psalm 113:3

From the rising unto the going down.

That is not a description of morning. It is a description of the whole rotation, drawn as a continuous line rather than as a list of good hours, and there is no gap in it anywhere for the night shift to fall through.

And read the next verse if you have it open: the Lord is high above all nations, and his glory above the heavens. The psalm is deliberately spatial and total. It is trying to leave nothing out, geographically and chronologically, and it succeeds.

You are inside the hours the psalm names. Not accommodated, not an exception. The written word draws the praise across the entire turn without a break in it, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a man cooking his breakfast at half four in the afternoon.

Now let me say something about the man who told you God is awake at three, because he was doing his best.

He was right and he was warm and it landed badly, and that is not his fault. He was answering a question about God's availability when what you actually needed was a place in the design rather than a concession from it.

You are not being accommodated, you are included. The written word never lists acceptable hours and then makes exceptions. The Holy Spirit is not doing you a favor by being present at three in the morning.

And now the thing that has been quietly wearing on you for nine years.

That every book, every talk and every card assumes a life you do not have, and after enough of them a man starts to feel like a variant of the real thing rather than the real thing.

You are not living an irregular version of this. From the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same, and your shift is inside that line at every single point of it. The Holy Spirit has been at that table for nine years of afternoons.