Forty Minutes Until the School Run

The television is still on, and it is showing a program about people buying a house in a country she has never been to, and the volume is at four, and the light coming through the blind is the flat white light of about ten past seven.

Nadia is on the couch. She has a blanket half over her that she did not put there. Her phone is on the floor, face down, at an angle that means it fell rather than was set down.

Forty minutes until she has to have two children in shoes and out of a door.

Everything in her is doing the thing it does on this particular morning: running the night backward at speed to find out how bad it was, and getting almost nowhere, and the almost is worse than a clear answer would be. And underneath that, running much faster, is the other thing. The verdict. It arrives fully formed and it does not argue: this is who you are, you have proved it again, and everything you have built since the last one has just been taken back off you.

She sits up. The room does the thing rooms do.

Somewhere above her a child gets out of bed, and she can hear it, the particular two footed thump, and the day is now happening whether or not she has decided anything about it.

Let me stop the story right there and speak to you, because if you are reading this on that morning I am not going to make you get to the end of a nice piece of writing first.

Here is what I am not going to do this morning. I am not going to ask you how long it had been. I am not going to say anything about starting again. I am not going to tell you what last night means about you, because it does not mean what it is currently telling you it means, and I am not going to add one ounce to what you are already carrying.

You are met this morning, and you were met before you sat up. Lamentations says His compassions fail not, they are new every morning, and new every morning is a supply issued on a schedule that has nothing to do with how the night before went; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that into a living room at ten past seven with the television still on.

New every morning

I want to take you to where that verse actually sits, because people quote it on greeting cards and it did not come from anywhere near a greeting card.

Lamentations is a book of five poems written by a man looking at a burned city. Not a setback. A ruin. He has watched the worst thing he can imagine happen to everything he loved, and he writes three chapters of it, and there is no comfort in them, and then in the middle of the third one he says this:

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 3:22-23

He says it in the ashes. That is the whole point of where it is placed. This is not a line for a good week. It is a line for a man sitting in the wreckage of the thing he cared most about, and he says the mercies are new this morning, in this specific morning, the one that came up over the ruins.

You have new mercy on the morning after the worst night, and you were not issued a reduced amount because of it. That is what stands written in Lamentations 3, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a word spoken over a burned city into a house with two children in it at ten past seven.

Now notice the word new. Not renewed, not extended, not topped up from yesterday's. New. Made this morning. Which means they were not made in response to what you did last night, because they were already coming before the night happened. The supply is on a rhythm and the rhythm is His faithfulness, and the next line says exactly that: great is thy faithfulness. His, not yours. The verse names whose reliability is holding the arrangement together and it is not the reader's.

You are living on somebody else's faithfulness this morning, and you were never the one keeping this arrangement in place. Scripture says great is thy faithfulness in the second person to God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a floor under a woman's feet on the morning she is least able to argue for herself.

And there is one more thing, and it is the sentence just before. It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed. Not consumed. He is not saying nothing bad happened. He is looking straight at a catastrophe and saying: I am still here, and the reason I am still here is not that it was not that bad. The reason is mercy. So being still here on this particular morning is not a small thing you should be embarrassed about. It is the evidence in the verse.

You are not consumed, and you were carried through the night by mercy and not by luck. The written word puts those two lines side by side on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes the fact of you being awake in a room this morning read as mercy rather than as an accusation.

Now the plain and important thing, and I am putting it in the middle of the article and not at the bottom in small print. If your body is in a bad way, go and see a doctor, today, and tell them the truth. Alcohol is not a thing to handle alone or to stop suddenly on your own judgement, and I am not qualified to tell you anything about your body and I am not going to try. Find a doctor. And beyond the body: the friend who already knows, the helpline, the counselor, the room where people sit in a circle and say true things, all of it is God's kindness with a face on it, and reaching for it this morning is not a failure of faith, it is one of the ways He has always kept people. Please use it.