In the Morning He Hears the First Thing You Say

The pot is the small one with the long handle, and there are three in this house of different sizes, and everybody has an opinion about which is correct and everybody is wrong except him.

Sunrise. The kitchen is orange with it. Two small cups on the tray and a third one because his brother came round early for no reason anybody has explained.

Water, coffee, one and a half spoons of sugar, on until it rises, off before it goes over. He has done this every day of his adult life.

And here is what he was thinking about while it came up.

Something has happened to him lately. He would not use a big word about it. But he has been more awake in the last stretch than he has been for years, and he knows it, and he is glad of it.

And he also knows himself. He gives it a week. Maybe two. He has been here before, and every time the thing that lifted him settled back down, and he went back to doing all of it without being in any of it.

So he is standing at a stove at sunrise pre-emptively grieving something good.

Habibi, pour a cup and sit down. Because there is one line in a psalm about the morning and it settles who is doing what.

Who is listening

David writes it in three parts and every part matters.

My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O LORD; in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee, and will look up.Psalm 5:3

My voice shalt thou hear in the morning. Read the grammar. He is not saying I will speak. He is saying You will hear. The certainty in the sentence is about the listener, not about the speaker.

In the morning will I direct my prayer. And then his part, which is small: he points something at somebody.

And will look up. And then a posture, which is smaller still.

The load in that verse is entirely on the wrong side from where you have been putting it. You have been carrying the whole thing, which is why you know it will not last two weeks.

You are heard by Somebody who is already listening, and the certainty in that verse sits with the One doing the hearing. That is not a rearrangement of the psalm to suit a tired man; Psalm 5:3 opens on thou shalt hear rather than on I will pray, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes David's morning and stands it up in a kitchen gone orange with sunrise. The arrangement was never yours to keep up.

Now the pre-emptive grieving, and I want to name it because it is doing something specific to you.

You are standing at a stove mourning a good thing while it is still in your hands. And you are doing it for a reason that is almost kind: you are trying to spare yourself the disappointment later by having it early.

But it does not work like that and you know it does not. Grieving something in advance does not reduce the loss. It only removes you from the having of it, which is exactly the condition you were glad to be coming out of.

You are being given today rather than a guarantee about Thursday, and He has never handed anybody more than one morning at a time. Lamentations 3:23 says they are new every morning, great is thy faithfulness, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the daily arrangement a mercy rather than a limitation, because a thing that arrives new every morning cannot be lost on a Thursday.

What He does not require you to do

One more thing, because it is the part that will change how you stand at that stove tomorrow.

Nothing in that verse asks David to maintain anything. He does not promise a program. He does not undertake to feel a particular way. He directs a prayer and looks up.

And there is a good reason the psalm is built that way. Anything that depends on a man's consistency will fail at exactly the rate his consistency fails, which for all of us is roughly two weeks. Anything that depends on God's listening does not.

So the question is not whether you will still feel this on Thursday. The question is whether He will still be hearing on Thursday, and that is not in doubt anywhere in the book.

You are not being asked to sustain anything, and the part of that arrangement that could fail was never assigned to you. Psalm 121:3 says he that keepeth thee will not slumber, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the keeping continuous in a way no man's morning routine has ever been.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it works before the coffee.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed there is. Not how long you can keep something going. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.