Joy in the Morning and No Date Attached

The kitchen in that flat has a counter you cannot get three people along at once, and every single morning all three of them try anyway.

Sunrise, more or less. Cereal. One of them is eating standing up, one is doing something to her hair over the sink, and the third has just arrived and is not talking to anybody yet.

Her phone is charging by the toaster and the alarm label says something hopeful. She typed it in about eight days ago at the end of a really good evening, and it goes off every morning at seven and she reads it every morning at seven.

And this morning she read it and thought: give it till the weekend.

Because that is the pattern and she is twenty six and she has enough evidence now. Something good happens, she feels different for a stretch, she writes something hopeful somewhere, and then a Thursday comes and it is gone and the hopeful thing on the phone becomes slightly embarrassing.

She has started pre-writing the ending. It saves time.

Hey, budge along the counter. Because there is a line about joy and morning that is on about four hundred thousand cards and I want you to see what it actually says about who does what.

The morning comes. Nobody makes it.

David writes it in a psalm about being lifted up.

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

Now the word I want is cometh.

Joy comes. It arrives. It is not manufactured, not sustained, not scheduled by the person waiting for it. It is described the way you would describe weather or a train: as a thing that turns up.

And it comes in the morning, which is another thing nobody produces. Nobody in the history of the world has ever made a morning happen. It arrives on somebody else's schedule with total reliability and it has never once been anybody's achievement.

You are waiting on something that comes rather than something you generate, and the morning in that verse arrives entirely without your involvement. That is not a nice reading of a card verse; Psalm 30:5 says joy cometh and puts it in the morning, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes David's line and stands it up in a flat kitchen at seven with a phone charging by the toaster. You have been treating this as an output. It is described as an arrival.

Now the pre-writing, and I want to name it because it is costing you more than you think.

You are writing the ending in advance to save yourself the disappointment. That is a completely understandable move and it is a very common one at your age, and it has a specific price.

The price is that you cannot be in a good stretch while you are in it. You are already standing at the end of it looking back. So the eight days you have just had, which were real, were spent partly at the finish line, and that is eight days of your actual life you have handed over to a Thursday that has not happened.

You are being given today rather than a guarantee about Saturday, and the pre-written ending has been taking the days you are actually in. Matthew 6:34 says take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that an actual relief rather than one more instruction to fail at.

Saturday is not yours to write off

One more thing, and it is the part I most want you to have.

You wrote off the weekend. Notice the presumption in that, and I mean it kindly. You made a decision about a day that does not exist yet, on behalf of a God who has not said anything about it.

Saturday belongs to Him in exactly the way this morning does. He makes them the same way, at the same rate, one at a time, and He has not yet indicated to you what is in it.

So when you write it off, you are not being realistic. You are guessing, in a direction that costs you, about something you have no information on.

You have no information about Saturday and it belongs to Him, and writing it off was a guess rather than a realism. Psalm 118:24 says this is the day which the Lord hath made, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that as true of a Saturday that has not arrived as of a Tuesday that has.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it works at seven in the morning over cereal.

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 have managed to hold on to a good stretch before. 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.