Resenting The Day Before It Starts

She has been awake eleven minutes and she has already lost two arguments.

Neither of them has happened. The first is with the man on the desk at work, who is going to ask her again, in that voice, whether the forms went through. The second is with her sister, who has not rung in a fortnight and will probably ring today, and she can hear the whole call already, both parts of it, while the room is still dark and the heating has not come on.

The alarm is not due for another nineteen minutes. She could sleep. She is not going to sleep. She is lying flat on her back in the dark doing the thing she does every morning now, which is to walk out ahead of the day and check it for teeth.

By the time the alarm sounds she is not tired. She is furious.

And here is what she would not say out loud to anybody, because of how it sounds. The day has not done one single thing to her. Nobody has spoken to her. The kettle has not boiled. The forms are exactly where she left them. Not one word of the argument with her sister has been said by either of them. She has convicted a day that has not got out of bed.

She swings her legs over the side and her feet hit the floor, and she is up, and she is already braced, jaw set, shoulders round her ears, walking into a kitchen like a woman walking into a courtroom.

You already stopped reading her, though. Somewhere around the nineteen minutes you started reading yourself.

You know that ceiling. You know the exact gray of it at that hour. You know the running order of the day laid out in the dark like a charge sheet, and you know the strange, tired shame of realizing that the heaviest thing you will carry today, you picked up before your feet touched the floor. It is not laziness and it is not weakness. Your body learned, somewhere, that being ready early costs less than being caught out late, and it has been paying that toll every single morning since, and it is exhausted.

Beloved, I am not going to tell you to be grateful. Not yet. I want to say the true thing first.

The grudge you woke up with was never about the morning

Hear me. That resentment is not irrational. It is a bill, and it came from somewhere.

Nobody wakes up angry at a day for no reason. You are angry because a day did this to you once, and then another one did, and after enough of them your body stopped waiting to find out and started assuming. The grudge you are carrying down the stairs is not this Tuesday's. It is old debt, transferred, and this morning is being made to pay for what a different morning did to you.

That is what I want you to see, because it changes what you speak to.

You have been fighting the day. The day was never the one who hurt you.

And now hear where the word about morning mercy actually comes from, because if you think it came from a comfortable man you will never be able to use it.

It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22-23

Look at the book it is sitting in. Lamentations. A funeral song over a burnt city. The man writing that line is standing in rubble, in the worst season of his life, and he does not write it because things are going well. He writes it because he has noticed something in the middle of the ruin: it came again. The light came again. He was not consumed. And in a city where everything else had been taken, the mercy showed up on time and it showed up new.

New. Not repeated. Not yesterday's, warmed over. New.

This is the same God who fed a whole nation in a desert with bread that came down in the night and could not be kept. They tried to keep it. They wanted a stock of it, a reserve, something to hold against tomorrow. It would not keep. He gave it fresh, every morning, on purpose, because He was not building a warehouse. He was building a relationship with people who would have to come and get it from Him again today.

So the mercy over this morning is not stale. It is not what is left over after yesterday. It has never been used. It has your name on it and it arrived before you were awake, before the argument in the dark, before you filed the charge, and it was already in the room while you were prosecuting the day.

And this is the part that undoes the bracing, if you will let it.

You are not walking into today first. He is already in it. He has been in it all night. Whatever is in that day, He got there before you, and He is not braced.