He Woke, and That Was the Whole of It

At ten past six the light is on the ceiling, in the corner where it always starts, and he is watching it the way you watch a kettle.

His hands are on top of the covers, palms down, and they have been there a while. Not folded. Just lying where they landed when the alarm went at six and he reached out and turned it off with two fingers, which is the only thing he has done today.

He is awake. That is important, because it is the thing he keeps checking. He is not lying there dozing, not drifting in and out. He is entirely, ordinarily awake, and he has been for twenty five minutes, and he cannot think of one reason to sit up.

He can list the day. He is good at lists. There is a call at eleven that he is not dreading. There is a form on the side that has been there since the ninth. There is the recycling, and the recycling is due, and the truck comes at some point after eight and he has heard it from this bed twice this week already. He can name every item. Not one of them supplies a reason. They are things that need doing, in a life that has gone quiet in the middle, and needing to be done turns out not to be the same thing as a reason to move.

He is not sad, exactly. He has gone looking for the word several mornings now and the nearest one he can find is flat.

The first morning like this he called a bad night. The second he called a phase, and made a joke about it to somebody at work. This one is further along than either of those, and somewhere in the last few weeks the mornings stopped being events and started being the shape of things.

And what frightens him is not the tiredness. It is the sentence that has started arriving with the light, the one that comes up the wall with it, quiet and reasonable, in his own voice. This is what I am now.

Because he is not lazy. Anyone who has ever worked beside him would laugh at the word. He is the one who came in early. He is the one people rang. He built things, he finished things, he carried more than his share for years without making anything of it. That is exactly why the ceiling is unbearable this morning: he knows precisely what he used to be at ten past six, and there is a man in this bed who cannot get himself upright, and he has quietly concluded that the second one is the true one and the first one was borrowed.

The light gets as far as the picture rail. His hands stay where they are.

You know that ceiling. You may not have a call at eleven and it may not be a Tuesday, but you know what it is to be awake and to go looking for one reason, just one, and find the shelf bare, and then to hear yourself start explaining what that must mean about you. I am not going to give you a reason and I am not going to give you a plan. I want to show you a sentence in an old song, written by a man in worse trouble than yours, that stops exactly where you stopped this morning.

The psalm stops where you stopped

David wrote this one outdoors, running from his own son, with an army behind him and no roof over him. It is the third song in the book and it is short. Here is the middle of it.

I lay down and slept; I woke again, for the LORD sustained me.Psalm 3:5

Read what it does not say. It does not say he woke and rose up and rallied the men. It does not say he woke with new resolve, or that the morning brought clarity, or that he found a reason. The sentence has three verbs in it, lay down, slept, woke, and then it stops and gives the reason, and the reason is not in David.

For the LORD sustained me. That is the whole engine of the verse. A man in the open, with everything gone, and what he writes down as the testimony worth keeping is that he was unconscious for a few hours and then he was conscious again, and that this was God's doing.

The word under sustained is samak. It means to lean something against a support, to prop, to press a hand down on a thing to hold it up. It is the same word used when hands are laid on a person to set them apart. It is not a word about encouragement. It is a word about weight being taken by something other than the thing that would otherwise fall.

You are already being held this morning, and the evidence for it is that you are awake to hear this. I am not decorating a bad morning. Psalm 3:5 puts the waking down as God's work and not the man's, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line written in a field by a hunted man and lays it under someone lying still with their hands on the covers.

And let me say one plain thing here, warmly and without any drama, before I go on. If this has been most mornings for weeks rather than this one morning, tell your doctor. That is not a spiritual failure and going is not a retreat. Bodies are looked after by ordinary means that God has been perfectly happy to use for a very long time, and I would rather say that out loud in the middle of this message than leave it politely unsaid.

You have a morning that is already accounted for, and you have not done one thing in it yet. That is not my encouragement, it is what is written into the grammar of Psalm 3, and His Spirit is the One who makes an old man's sentence a present fact in a quiet room at ten past six.

There was never supposed to be a reason in you

Here is what I think happened on the shelf where the reason should have been.

You have been producing your own reasons for years. Not selfishly. You produced them for other people, mostly: somebody had to be up, somebody had to be steady, and it was you, so the reason got manufactured every morning out of whatever was left. And it worked, for a long time, which is the trouble, because a thing that works for a long time starts to look like who you are rather than what you were doing.

Psalm 3 has the reason outside the man on purpose. The Lord sustained me. Not: I found something to get up for. Not: I remembered my purpose. The support is external, it is applied to him, and it is applied while he is asleep and entirely unable to cooperate with it.

You were sustained through the whole of last night by a hand you never felt, and it did not need your permission. That is what the written word says samak means and where it puts it, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries that from a page into a body that cannot currently produce anything.

So when you went looking for a reason this morning and found nothing, you were not discovering a fault in yourself. You were discovering the edge of a supply you were never meant to be generating in the first place. The shelf is bare because it was your shelf. It was never the source.

And I want to take one thing off you before we go further, because I think you picked it up this week and it does not belong to you. The mornings are not a measurement. Not of your faith, not of your character, not of your discipline, not of how much you love the people who are counting on you. You are not the sum of what you can get done before eleven. Scripture has a man flat on the ground being propped up by God and calling that his testimony, and the Spirit does not read a still body as a failed one.