Awake Before the Watchmen

The fridge comes on, and Anna knows the sound so well now that she can hear it start before it starts.

Four in the morning. Third time this week. She stopped putting the big light on around March, because the big light makes it official, and there is something about the small lamp over the counter that lets the night stay night for a while longer.

She has a chair pulled up to the window. Not the good chair. The kitchen one with the wobble, dragged over some weeks ago and never put back, which she has decided not to think about too much.

Outside there is nothing yet. Not dark exactly, because of the streetlight at the corner, but nothing. The gardens are shapes. A cat crosses the top of the fence with the confidence of something that has slept.

On the drying rack in the corner there is laundry that went on two days ago and is still faintly damp at the seams. On the counter there is a mug from the last time she did this. On the table there is a list, from Sunday, with four things on it, and three of them are still there.

And this is the part she has stopped saying out loud to anybody, because of how it sounds.

It is not the being awake. The being awake she could survive. It is that at four in the morning she is already at the front of a day that has nothing in it, and she can see across the whole of it from here, and there is no hour in it that she has anything to spend. Not the school run. Not the phone call about the furnace. Not the twenty minutes she said she would give to her sister on Wednesday and has moved twice.

The day is already lost, and it has not started.

And underneath that, quieter and much worse, a sentence that has been assembling itself for about four months now: this is what I am like now. Not this is a hard season. Not this is what tired looks like. This is what I am.

She has never said it to anyone. She has hardly said it to herself. But it sits in the chair with her at four in the morning, and it is patient, and it has a lot of evidence.

Anna pulls the blanket off the back of the chair over her knees. The fridge stops. In the quiet after it stops, she can hear a truck somewhere out on the main road, changing gear.

She is not praying. She would not call this praying. She is a woman with cold feet in a dark kitchen, looking at a garden she cannot see, waiting for a sky she is too tired to want.

The watchmen never made the light

There is a line in the psalms written by somebody who knew this hour, and it is worth reading twice because of who is in it.

My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning.Psalm 130:6

Watchmen. Men on a wall in the dark, and what they are doing is waiting for morning.

Here is the thing about them that I do not want you to miss. They are not making the morning. Not one of them, on the coldest night of the year, ever contributed anything to the sunrise. They cannot bring it forward. They cannot earn it with a better watch or a straighter back or a more disciplined attitude on the wall. Their entire job is to be there while it is dark and to still be there when it is not.

Morning comes to watchmen. It has never once been the other way around.

You are inside a psalm this morning, not outside the reach of one. That is not my kindness, it is what is written in Psalm 130:6, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line about men on a wall and sets it down in a kitchen with an drying rack in the corner.

And while we are here, one plain thing, because a message about four in the morning that skips it would not be honest. If this has been most mornings for weeks rather than this one morning, please tell your doctor. That is not a spiritual failure and going is not a retreat. Bodies get exhausted in ways that need looking at, and God is nowhere near offended by an appointment.

You have permission to be looked after, and it was never in competition with being held by God. The written word puts the care of people in the hands of other people constantly, and the Spirit of God is not standing in the doorway of a clinic waiting for you to try something more spiritual first.

Waiting is not a failed version of doing

I want to stay on that psalm, because the man writing it says something strange about waiting.

He does not apologize for it. He does not treat it as the low state he is in until the real activity begins. He measures it, and he measures it upward: more than they that watch for the morning, and then he says it again, in case you thought he had overstated it the first time.

Waiting, in that line, is the whole of what a soul is doing. It is not a gap between two useful things. It is not the shape your life takes when you have failed at the other shape.

Which matters at four o'clock, because at four o'clock the mind has usually already filed today under wasted. Nothing will be achieved. The list from Sunday will stay at three. And if a day only counts when something is produced in it, then a woman in a wobbly chair with a blanket over her knees is having a day that does not count, and by extension is a person who does not count, and that is the sentence that has been quietly assembling itself since March.

It is not true. It has evidence and it is still not true.

You were never being measured by your capacity, and the sentence that has been building since March has no right to stay. Scripture never once grades a soul by its output, and the same Spirit who breathed Psalm 130 is the One who evicts a lie that has been sitting in a chair for four months acting like a landlord.

You are held right now, in the dark, at the front of a day you cannot do. That is what is written and not what I am hoping for you, and His Spirit is the One who makes an old line arrive in a kitchen in real time rather than in general.