Before The Kettle And Before The List

Maud has been staying at her grandmother's for eleven days and she has got up early three of them, and she is starting to suspect she has misunderstood the entire arrangement.

Vonnie is seventy-eight and gets up at ten past six most days, and Maud, who is twenty-four and has read a great deal about routines, had assumed that this was the secret. Get up before the world. Beat everybody to it. There is a whole industry built on that idea and Maud has bought most of it.

So she got up at ten past six on Tuesday. And on Wednesday. And on Friday, which nearly finished her.

And she noticed something that has bothered her ever since, which is that she came downstairs on all three of those mornings with her head already going. Before her feet were on the floor she was in the day. The email she had not sent. The thing her sister said. Whether the car needs doing. She had beaten the world out of bed by two hours and lost anyway, because the list does not wait for daylight and never has.

Vonnie was on the porch with a blanket on her knees on the Friday when Maud came out with a face on her.

"You're up," Vonnie said.

"I am not doing very well at this."

Vonnie asked what it was she thought she was doing, and Maud said, honestly, that she was trying to be like her, and Vonnie laughed so hard she had to put her cup down.

Then she said the thing. She said: "Love, the hour has got nothing to do with it. I lie there and the list starts talking to me same as you. I have got a list as long as your arm. All I do is say something to Him before I answer it."

Maud said: what do you say?

And Vonnie said: "Whatever is true. Some mornings it is thank you. Some mornings it is help. Some mornings all I have got is here I am. And then I get up and put the kettle on and answer the list."

Eleven days. Maud had been going after the wrong thing for eleven days and the actual thing takes about four seconds and works at any hour at all.

You have been going after the wrong thing too, most likely. Somewhere along the line the first hour became a performance you were failing, an early alarm you could not sustain, a version of a morning belonging to somebody with a different life from yours. And nobody has sat you down on a porch and told you the hour has nothing to do with it.

The Man In The Psalm Was Not Boasting About The Hour

There is a line people quote at each other about early mornings that is not really about the clock at all.

"I prevented the dawning of the morning, and cried: I hoped in thy word."Psalm 119:147

Prevented, in the old English of that translation, means went before. He got in ahead of it. And people have read that for a long time as a statement about how early he was up, and have then felt bad about themselves, which is a remarkable outcome for a verse.

But look at the second half of the line, because that is where the actual content is. I hoped in thy word. He is not describing his discipline. He is describing what he reached for before anything else got to him.

You are already reaching for something in the first ninety seconds of being awake. Psalm 119 puts the reaching and not the hour in the middle of that sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line that has been used to make people feel late and turns it back into what it was.

There is an older picture underneath it too. The first of a harvest is not the fruit picked at a particular time of day. It is the fruit that comes before the rest of the crop, so that everything after it follows something already named. Order, not hour. That is the whole grammar of this subject and it has been mistranslated into alarm clocks for a very long time.

You were never asked for an hour, only for the beginning of your own day. That is what the written word means by the first every single time it uses the word, and it is the Spirit of God who takes the weight of a misreading off somebody who has been carrying it for years.

Four Seconds, At Any Hour, With Whatever You Have

Now the plain part, the way Vonnie would say it on the porch.

The list will start talking. That is not a spiritual failure, it is a nervous system. You will be awake for about four seconds before the first thing arrives, and it is usually the worst thing, and that is how people are made.

The whole of this is: say something to Him before you answer it.

Not a session. Not a length. Not a page of a book and a candle and a special chair, although if you like those there is nothing wrong with them. One true sentence, in the order, before the list gets its answer.

You have everything you need for that already, lying down, with your eyes half shut. It is written that He is a very present help, which is a phrase about availability and not about preparation, and His Spirit is the one who is already in the room at the moment you surface.

And say the guard, because this is precisely where a light thing gets heavy. Nothing on this page is a rule. There is no minimum, no number of minutes, no streak to keep, no habit you have been signed up to, and nothing at all routed to anybody. If tomorrow you are up and dressed and out of the door before you remember any of this, you are exactly as much His at nine o'clock as you would have been at six, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this off the shelf where rules live.