What Am I Getting Up For

Twenty past six, and he has been sitting on the edge of the bed for nineteen minutes with both feet flat on the carpet.

Nothing is wrong. That is the part he cannot explain to anybody. Nobody has died. The job is fine. The people in this house love him and he knows it. He is not lying there wishing he were somewhere else, and he is not in pain, and if you asked him at a party he would say things are good, and he would mean it.

He is simply sitting there because he cannot locate the thing that makes a person stand up.

He has tried working backwards. There is a shower, and after that a kettle, and after that a car, and after that a screen, and every one of those is true and none of them is a reason. He has tried the list of people who need him, and it works for about four seconds, and then it turns into weight instead of fuel. He has tried praying, and what came out was one sentence, honest and slightly embarrassed: what am I actually getting up for.

The heating clicks on. The window is gray at the edges. His feet are on the floor and have been for nineteen minutes, and the strange thing, the thing he would never say out loud, is that he is not unhappy. He is just not started. There is a difference and almost nobody knows it until they are living in it.

He is waiting to feel a reason before he moves.

And now I am going to stop saying he.

Because that is your carpet, and those are your feet, and you have been sitting there long enough that the room has gone from dark to gray while you were deciding. You are not depressed exactly, or maybe you are, and either way nobody is going to hand you a diagnosis in the first four minutes of a message. You are just sitting on the edge of a bed with a whole day standing outside the door, waiting for something inside you to start it.

I want to tell you where the reason actually is. It is not in you, and it never was, and that is the best news you will hear this morning.

The reason was never inside the tent

There were six hundred thousand people camped in a desert, and not one of them woke up with a reason.

Think about what that camp actually was. No fields. No harvest coming. Nothing planted, nothing owed to them, nothing on the way. Every single morning in that wilderness began with a person opening their eyes into a landscape that offered them absolutely nothing, which is a fairly good description of what a Tuesday feels like from the edge of your bed.

And every single morning, before any of them were awake, the ground outside was already covered.

They did not manufacture it. They did not qualify for it. They did not get more of it for feeling more motivated about it, and the ones who dragged themselves out late got exactly the same weight as the ones who went out at first light. It was measured out by the omer, a portion each, and here is the detail that undoes a person once they see it: it was there before they wanted it. The provision did not wait for the appetite. The appetite came from the provision.

That is the order, and we have it backwards nearly all the time. We think the sequence runs feel it, then rise, then receive. In the wilderness the sequence ran rise, receive, and the feeling comes somewhere around the third mouthful.

Now hold that beside the sentence a man wrote in the worst week of his life, sitting in the ashes of a burned city, having lost more than most people lose in a lifetime.

The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. "The LORD is my portion," says my soul, "therefore I will hope in him."Lamentations 3:22-24

Read what he does not say. He does not say I have found my reason. He does not say I woke up motivated. He says a word that would have been unmistakable to anyone Hebrew: portion. Chelek. It is a land word. When the tribes came into the country, every family was assigned a share, and the boundary was walked and the stones were set, and that piece of ground was yours in a way nothing could argue with. Except one tribe. The Levites got no field at all. What they were given instead, written into the law in plain language, was this: the LORD is your portion.

So a man in the ruins reaches for the one word that means the share that was assigned to me and cannot be reassigned, and he puts God's own name in the middle of it.

Your portion is not your energy. Your portion is not your sense of purpose, which comes and goes with your blood sugar and the weather. Your portion is a Person, and He was allotted to you, and He is outside your tent this morning in the same measure He was yesterday, whether or not one single thing in you is stirring.

You are not getting up because you found a reason. You are getting up because there is a portion out there with your name on it, and it was put there while you were asleep.