Racing Before The Day Asked

You come up out of sleep at about ten past six, and your heart is already going.

Not building. Going. Somewhere up around a hundred and ten by the feel of it, thudding in the side of your neck and in your ears against the pillow, and you have been conscious for perhaps four seconds.

You lie very still, because that is what you do now. You keep your head exactly where it is on the pillow and you look at the ceiling and you take stock of yourself like somebody checking a car after a noise. Jaw: already clamped. Hands: buzzing at the fingertips. Stomach: dropped out, that hollow lift like the second before a fall. Breath: high and shallow, up in the top of the chest where it does no good at all.

The radiator ticks. There is a line of gray light at the edge of the blind. Somewhere down the street a van door slams.

And the day has not asked you for one single thing.

That is what makes no sense of it. There is no meeting. There is no letter on the mat. Nobody is angry with you. If somebody sat on the end of the bed right now and said, all right, what is coming, you would have nothing to give them. It is an ordinary Wednesday and you are lying in it with a body that has started the race without you and did not tell you which race.

So you do the thing you always do, which is to try and think of the reason, because if there is a reason then there is something to answer. And your head starts turning things over, the thing at work, the thing you said, the thing you did not do, holding each one up against the feeling to see if it fits. None of them fit. None of them are big enough. And now you have been at it four minutes and your heart has not come down one beat and you have added a layer of frustration on top.

Then the second thought comes, the one you never say out loud. What is wrong with me.

Stop there. Two things before anything else, and I want them plain.

If something in your chest is new, or it is not letting up, or something in you is quietly saying this one is different, call your emergency number now and let a person look at you. That is not overreacting and it is not a failure of nerve. Nothing on this page is going anywhere, and it will still be here afterward.

And the other thing. This is not a failure of faith. A body that comes online at ten past six going flat out is not the body of somebody with a weak walk or a shallow trust. A frightened body is not a faithless body. It never has been, and there is nobody in heaven shaking their head at you this morning.

The first voice in a morning does not have to be yours

I want to put a verse in your hands, and I want you to notice who is doing the work in it.

It is written by a man whose spirit was overwhelmed inside him and whose heart, he says, was desolate. That is his own account of his own condition, three lines before the verse I am about to give you. He is not writing this from a good week.

Cause me to hear thy lovingkindness in the morning; for in thee do I trust: cause me to know the way wherein I should walk; for I lift up my soul unto thee.Psalm 143:8

Cause me to hear.

Not I will hear. Not I will get myself into the right frame of mind before breakfast. Cause me. He is asking God to do the making audible, because he already knows he cannot generate it from where he is lying, and that request was written down and kept for three thousand years as an entirely legitimate way to open a day.

Beloved, hear this. You are not required to arrive at this morning already calm. The word never asks that of you and the Holy Spirit is not standing over the bed waiting for you to produce a mood before He speaks.

And look at what he asks to hear. Lovingkindness. Not instructions. Not a verdict on how he is handling himself. The first sound he wants in the day is the sound of being loved, and he asks for it precisely because his chest is in the state it is in.

Now the other half. Cause me to know the way wherein I should walk.

The way. Singular. The next bit of road, not the whole map, not the afternoon, not the phone call on Thursday. Your body at ten past six is running the entire day at once, every hour of it simultaneously, which is exactly why it is going at a hundred and ten while you lie completely still. Nothing is happening. Everything is being rehearsed.

So you have a Father who deals in the next step and never once handed anybody the whole road at first light. That is written into the verse itself, and His Spirit is the One who makes the next step visible when the whole day is not.

And the last line is a body word. I lift up my soul unto thee. Lifting is something you do with your arms. Even flat on your back, the picture is of raising something up and handing it over, which is a very different motion from clutching it to your chest and trying to work out what it is.

Here is what I want you to have. Your day did not begin when your heart did. It began in the mouth of God, before the alarm, before the van door, before your eyes opened, and you are already inside a morning He has spoken over. That is not sentiment; it is what the word says about His mercies being new every morning, and the same Spirit who kept a desolate man writing psalms is in this room while your fingertips buzz.