The Alarm at Twenty to Six

The alarm is set for twenty to six because the bus is at ten past and the gate closes at five to seven, and the alarm has gone off, and Yusuf has not moved.

He is looking at a crack in the ceiling that he has been looking at for four years. He knows exactly what he has to do. Feet on the floor, twelve steps to the bathroom, shirt off the back of the chair, out. He has done it a thousand times. There is nothing complicated in it.

His body will not go.

It is not the body, really. He knows that. His body would go if he told it to. What has stopped is somewhere else, and it stopped at about the moment he woke up and remembered, and what it feels like from in here is not sadness and not even guilt exactly, it is a kind of enormous administrative weight, as if there is a form to fill in before he is allowed to be a person today and he has not got the form.

Last night happened. It has been a while and it happened. And the way it is being reported to him, lying here at eighteen minutes to six, is not as a thing that happened but as a thing he is.

Outside somebody's car starts. The light through the thin curtain has gone from gray to the color of weak tea. Seventeen minutes to six.

Let me speak straight to you now, if this is your morning.

I am not going to ask how long it had been before last night. Nobody is counting anything here and nobody is going to. I am not going to talk to you about starting over, because you are not at the start, you are in the middle, and the middle is where everybody who is still walking happens to be. And I am certainly not going to explain to you what last night proves, because it does not prove the thing it is telling you it proves, and I am not adding one gram to what is already sitting on your chest.

You are inside a morning that God assigned to joy, and you were never handed a night that was supposed to run into the day. The psalm says weeping may endure for a night but joy cometh in the morning, and both halves of that are appointments with a length; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a real boundary in a room where the light through the curtain has just gone the color of weak tea.

Joy cometh in the morning

Let me name what is actually holding you down, because it is not laziness and calling it that is both cruel and wrong.

What is holding you down is a verdict. It arrived the second you woke, and it is written in the present tense about your whole person, and it is very loud, and it has excellent evidence. And a man cannot get out of bed under a verdict. Nobody can. You are not failing to move because you lack willpower. You are failing to move because a court is in session in your own ceiling and you are waiting for a sentence.

So look at what the psalm actually says about the proportions.

For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.Psalm 30:5

Two measures, side by side, and they are not the same size. A moment against a lifetime. A night against a morning. David is not saying God never has anything to say about anything; he is saying that whatever God has to say is small, and that what God is toward you is large, and that the two things are not remotely in proportion.

You have a lifetime of favor over you and you were never under an endless anger, and you have that proportion this morning. That is written into Psalm 30, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a measurement made in a psalm and applies it to a man lying still at seventeen minutes to six.

Now look at the word night. Weeping may endure for a night. A night is a real thing with a real length, and the psalm does not pretend it away. It does not say the weeping was not warranted. It says it has a duration, and the duration is a night, and the night has just ended.

You are on the other side of the night God gave a boundary to, and you were never told to carry the night into the day as well. Scripture puts weeping in the night and joy in the morning, and the Holy Spirit is the one who enforces that boundary in a bedroom where somebody's car has just started outside.

And notice who is doing the coming. Joy cometh. It is not something you produce and it is not something you have to feel by five to seven. It is described as arriving, the way morning arrives, on its own schedule, without asking whether you are ready. Your job in that sentence is to be there when it does. Which is another way of saying: get up. Not because you are fine. Because morning has come and you belong in it.

You are welcome in this morning exactly as you are, and you were never asked to feel better before you were allowed into the day. The written word says joy cometh, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes room in a day for a man who is not feeling any of it yet.

And now the plain and necessary thing, said in the body of this article and not in small print at the bottom. If your body is in a bad state, go and see a doctor today and tell them the truth. Do not make decisions about stopping, or about your body, on your own. That is not a spiritual failure, it is basic care, and I am not qualified to say anything about your body and will not try. And beyond the doctor: the friend who already knows, the helpline, the counselor, the room with the circle of chairs, all of that is God's kindness with a face on it. Reaching for it this morning is one of the ways He has always kept people upright, and reaching is not weakness.