Whenever Your Day Actually Begins

The mug she drinks out of first is the blue one with the chip on the handle, and she drinks out of it while the rest of the street is coming home.

Her day starts at a quarter past three in the afternoon. The blind stays down. Somebody's car door goes in the road outside, and there is a trash can being wheeled, and a child two gardens over shouting about a bike, and all of it belongs to the second half of everybody else's Tuesday. She stands at the counter in the half dark with her hands round the mug and lets her eyes come properly open, and she has eleven minutes before she has to start moving in earnest.

She has read the verses about the morning. She knows the ones about rising early while it is still dark. She has heard sermons about the first hour, and every single one of them was preached to a person whose day begins when the sun comes up, and she has sat there each time doing quiet arithmetic in her head about whether five in the afternoon counts, and concluding, without ever quite saying it, that it does not, and that whatever the good version of this is, it is for other people with other timetables.

So God gets her in the van at ten past eleven at night, on the way in, in a tired mumble at the traffic lights. Which is not nothing. She would tell you that herself. But she knows the difference between what she gives Him and what is left of her, and it has been the leftovers for four years.

Maybe your day begins at a quarter to five with a baby. Maybe it begins three times because the pain woke you twice. Maybe it begins whenever the tablets have taken hold enough for you to be a person.

The morning in the psalm is not a slot on a clock

Take the line she has been failing, and look at what it is actually doing.

Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love, for in you I trust. Make me know the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul.Psalm 143:8

Two requests, and they sit in that order for a reason. Hearing first, direction second. He does not ask to be told what to do and then have the love added on afterwards as encouragement. He asks to hear that he is loved, at the top, and then to be shown the road.

Now the word morning. In that psalm it is boqer, the break of the day, and the psalm is written by a man whose life did not run on a timetable at all. He is being hunted. His days start when they start. What he is reaching for is not the hour on a dial, it is the top of the day, the first moment consciousness has assembled itself enough to say anything at all. For a shepherd that was light. For a woman on nights it is a quarter past three in the afternoon with the blind still down. Same top. Same first.

You have the first hour of your own day, and God is not standing at somebody else's clock waiting for you to get there. That is not my adjustment of the text to be kind to you. The word in the psalm means the break of a day and His word never said whose. His Spirit is the one who wakes a person and He is not confused about what shift you are on.

The first is not a length, and it is not a quota

Here is where this subject goes wrong, and it goes wrong the same way every time. Somebody hears the first and turns it into an amount. Then it becomes a duration, and then it becomes a standard, and then a person who managed four minutes has failed at something, and by that point the whole thing has quietly turned into an account being kept.

That is not what the first has ever been. The first of a thing is the acknowledgment of where the thing came from. It is not a length and it is not a price and it is not a portion of anything. A man who carries the first of a harvest to God is not paying for the rest of the harvest. He is saying out loud, with something in his hands, that he did not make the rain.

So there is no figure here. There is no measure, no half hour, no plan. There is one sentence at the top of your own waking, and it may be six words long, and six words at the top is genuinely the first.

You have already been given the standing to speak to God the moment your eyes open, and nothing in the day has to be earned before you use it. Scripture puts the hearing before the direction, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a sentence out of a dark kitchen and sets it in front of the throne of God without a single delay in transit. Nobody is timing you.

Nothing here is a lever

One more thing, and then we will go on, because it matters more than the rest of this put together.

Beginning your day with God is not a technique for making the day go well. It does not secure anything. It does not protect the shift, settle the manager, or make the drive home easier. Anyone who has ever begun a day properly with God and then had a genuinely terrible day already knows this, and they should not be told otherwise by somebody who wants a tidy article.

The reason to give Him the top of the day is simpler and much better. He is the one it came from. Acknowledging that is not an investment. It is honesty, spoken at the earliest possible moment, and honesty at the top of a day changes the person speaking rather than the hours ahead of them.

You are His before you are useful, and you were His while you were asleep, which is when you were producing absolutely nothing. The written word makes His faithful love the first thing the psalmist reaches for and not the reward at the end of a good performance, and the Spirit of God does not audit a night shift.