The Curtains Stayed Shut

The curtains have a gap where they do not quite meet, and a line of light has been lying across the bed since about seven. It has moved maybe a hand's width in three hours. She has watched it move.

She has been awake the whole time. That is the part she cannot explain to anybody. Not asleep, not resting, not sick in any way she could name at a front desk. Awake, on her side, facing the gap, with the covers up under her chin and a whole day on the other side of them.

The list is in her head and it has not changed since six. The field trip form. The pharmacy. Call back about the appointment. Nothing on it is hard. Not one item would take a well person more than ten minutes, and that is exactly the thing sitting on her chest, because she cannot do any of it and there is no reason she can point to.

At 8:20 the front door went. At 9:15 the dog gave up and lay down against the bedroom door with a sound like a bag of sand. Her phone is face down on the other pillow. There are three messages on it. One is from her sister, who has started using the word "just" a lot. Just get up and get in the shower. Just get outside for ten minutes.

So she has spent the morning doing the only thing she has any energy for, which is deciding what this means about her. She has been at it eleven days now and she has got quite far. Lazy is one of the words. Weak is another. There is a longer one she keeps circling and will not land on, which is that maybe she was never really strong at all, that the years of being the one who got everything done were a performance, and this is the real her showing through, and everybody is about to find out.

It is 10:40. The line of light has crossed the fold of the sheet. She has not opened the curtains, and she is not going to, and the distance between that fact and the person she believed herself to be is where she has been living since a week last Tuesday.

Nobody is coming in. Nobody is going to sit on the end of the bed. That is not even the worst of this morning. The worst of it is that the verdict went in days ago, and it went in before anybody asked her a single question about how tired she actually is.

I am not going to ask you to get up. There is no list here, no schedule, no ten minutes of fresh air. I want to say something about the verdict, and then something about the light that is already in the room.

The verdict went in before anybody asked

Let me go straight at the thing you have been doing since seven o'clock, because it is louder in that room than anything else and nobody names it.

You have not been resting. You have been holding a small private courtroom, and you are the only witness called, and the case is about what kind of person cannot open her own curtains. Every hour the light moves, another exhibit goes in. The unanswered messages. The form. The word your sister used.

And it is a rigged court, because exhaustion is the thing giving evidence about exhaustion. A body with nothing in it tells you that there was never anything in it. That is what empty does. It rewrites the past as well as the morning, which is why the verdict always comes back the same and always sounds so reasonable at 10:40.

Now let me read you something written by a man at the bottom of the worst thing that ever happened to him. Not a morning person. Not somebody having a good day.

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22-23

Read where that sentence is standing. It is in the middle of a book of grief, in a chapter that has just finished saying that his soul is bowed down within him. He is not describing his morning. He is describing God's. The newness is not something he generated by getting up, and the faithfulness being called great is not his.

You are not the one being measured this morning. Lamentations 3:23 puts the greatness on His faithfulness and not on the person reading it, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line written from the floor of a ruined city and lays it under a woman who has been awake since six with her face to a gap in the curtains.

Here is the part the court has not admitted. The mercies were new in that room at seven, while she was lying still. They did not arrive on the strength of anything she did, because she did nothing, and they came anyway, which is the whole point of the word mercy and always has been.

You have mercy that arrived before you were awake enough to see it, and it was never issued on performance. That is what is written, and His Spirit is the One who makes it a present tense fact in a bedroom rather than a nice sentence about somebody else's ruined city.

What today is actually the size of

There is a second thing the verdict gets wrong, and it is about size.

God has never given anybody strength for the road. He gave manna one morning at a time and told them not to store it. He said the day has enough of its own trouble. He said, as your days, so shall your strength be, and the plural there is doing careful work: days, one at a time, each with its own measure, none of them borrowed forward.

So the strength for the fourteen things on that list was never in you and was never supposed to be. There is a portion for today, sized to today, and today at the moment is a bed and a line of light and a dog against the door.

You were given today's portion, and today is the only thing it was ever measured against. That is written into how He fed a whole people for forty years, and the Holy Spirit is the One who brings it now, at the size of this hour rather than the size of the week you were planning in your head at six.

One plain thing before I go on, and it belongs here in the teaching rather than anywhere near the end. 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. It is one of the ordinary ways God looks after people, and the appointment you were going to call back about is a good thing to keep.

You are held in that bed at 10:40, at the exact hour you cannot get out of it. Scripture puts His mercies inside the morning itself, and the Holy Spirit does not stand at the end of the day counting what got done. Nothing about being held is waiting on the curtains.