The Morning After The Argument

"Fine. Have it your way."

Twenty to eleven at night, in a kitchen with one lamp on over the cooker, and that is the last whole sentence anybody in that house says out loud.

After it comes the running of a tap. Then a cupboard door closed a little harder than a cupboard door needs to be closed. Then a person on the stairs and a person still standing at the counter, and hanging between them like smoke that will not clear, four sentences that never got said and one that should never have been.

The light goes off. They lie down in the same bed anyway, because that is what two people who have been married a long time do. Neither of them touches the other. Both of them look at a ceiling they cannot see.

Now come forward to ten past six in the morning.

Nothing has been fixed. That is the first thing to understand about this hour. Sleep is not a negotiator. Sleep does not go quietly through the file while you are unconscious and hand you a settlement at dawn, and whoever told you to sleep on it never had to wake up on the wrong side of one of these.

They are both awake. Each of them knows the other one is awake. Neither of them moves, because the first person to move has to decide what kind of day this is going to be, and neither of them wants to be the one who decides.

So they lie there, six inches apart, in the exact position of two people who love each other, doing arithmetic.

He is walking last night backwards, hunting for the place it turned, the way a man walks a fence line looking for the gap the sheep got out of. She has three opening lines ready and does not like any of them. The alarm is four minutes out, and after the alarm there is a whole day, and the day does not care what happened in that kitchen.

I know that ceiling.

And I think you are lying under it. You are the one who has to get up in a minute, braced before your feet are on the floor, tired before anything has asked anything of you. Whatever you decide about how to walk into that kitchen, you are about to decide it flat on your back with nothing in the tank.

I want to get to you before the alarm does.

Something got to this morning before you did

Here is what I need you to hear while you are still lying there.

You are not the first thing awake in that room.

There is a line written by a man who was sitting in the wreckage of a burned city, watching his whole nation carried off, with nothing in his hands and nothing coming. He was not writing in a good season. He was writing in the worst one anybody in that country had ever seen.

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 and 23

New every morning.

Read what that does not say. It does not say new every morning that you handled well. It does not say new every morning provided the previous evening was a credit to you. It does not say the mercy is issued on review.

It says new. Every morning. Including this one. Including the one that opens onto a kitchen you do not want to walk into.

And I want you to notice the timing of it, because the timing is the whole thing. That mercy was not made this morning in response to how you handle the next ten minutes. It was on the ground before you woke, the way the manna was on the ground before anybody in the camp had opened their eyes, lying there in the gray light waiting for people who had grumbled the whole way there the day before.

They did not earn the bread by having a better attitude overnight. They went out and there it was.

So the argument is real, and it is not the first fact of this day. It is the second one. The first fact of this day is compassion that did not run out during the night, and it is sitting on the floor of your bedroom right now, and it has your name on it, and nothing said in that kitchen at twenty to eleven changed a single thing about whether it came.

One more thing about manna, and it matters more than it looks. It could not be hoarded. Yesterday's portion was no use to anybody this morning, and today's is not a supply you have to be careful with. Which means two things at once. You cannot live today on the fact that you took this well last time. And you cannot be disqualified today by the fact that you did not.

There is no streak here. There is no record being kept of the mornings you missed. If you are reading this at four in the afternoon because the whole day already got away from you, you have not turned up late. You have turned up.