Before You Have Had a Single Thought

Five twelve in the morning. The clock on the dresser is the old kind with the numbers that glow green, and she knows it is five twelve without turning her head, because she has been awake since about ten to and she has already checked twice.

The alarm is set for six. There is a seam of light under the door from the hall lamp they leave on for the boy. The ceiling fan is going on low and she is watching one blade come around and come around, and the room is exactly the way it was last night, and the house is quiet, and the dog has not stirred.

And there is a weight sitting on her chest like somebody set a bag of flour on her.

Here is the strange part, and it is the part she has never been able to explain to anybody. Nothing has happened. She has not thought about the bill yet. She has not remembered the conversation from Tuesday yet. She has not opened her eyes onto a single item of her actual life. The day has not started, there is nothing in it yet to be afraid of, and the fear is already at work, ahead of her, waiting in the room like it got up first and made coffee.

So she lies still and does what she always does. She runs the inventory. The boy is fine, he is asleep down the hall. Her husband is fine, he is breathing beside her. Her mother is fine, she talked to her Sunday. Work is fine. The car is fine.

Everything is fine. Nothing is wrong.

And the weight does not move an ounce.

That is the thing that frightens her most, if she is honest. Not the dread. The fact that she cannot find the reason for it, which means she cannot fix it, which means it can come back tomorrow, and it does come back tomorrow, and it has come back most mornings now since about February.

She turns her face into the cool side of the pillow. Six minutes until the alarm.

Now I am going to stop calling her she.

Because you know the ceiling. You know the exact green numbers and the exact number of minutes you have left before you are required to be a functioning person, and you know the weight, and you know that if anybody in your house asked you what is wrong you would have absolutely nothing to give them. Nothing is wrong. That is the whole problem.

And somewhere in the last year or so a second voice got into the room with you and it says a worse thing than the dread does. It says: a person who really trusted God would not wake up like this.

Stay right there. Do not get up yet. I want to talk to you about that.

Your body woke before your mind did

First, the plain truth about what happened in that bed at ten to five, because you have never been told it and you have been carrying a wrong explanation for months. You are not being diagnosed here. You are being told the truth by the Spirit who was awake in that room before the dread was, and by the word, which has never once called a heavy morning a failure.

Your body woke up before your mind did. That is all. The alarm system in you is older and faster than the part of you that reasons, and it does not wait for evidence. It runs on what it learned. Somewhere behind you there was a season when waking up genuinely did mean bracing, and your body took that lesson seriously, the way it was built to, and it has kept the practice going long after the season ended. It is not lying to you. It is doing its job with old information.

That is what dread on an ordinary Tuesday actually is. It is not a message about God. It is not a reading on your trust. It is a faithful old watchman standing at a gate that nobody is coming through any more, and he has not been told, and he will not stand down until somebody tells him.

So let me put this one down for you before we go any further, and I mean it plainly. The weight on your chest at five in the morning is not a failure of faith. It is not unbelief taking a physical form. There is no verse anywhere that says the person who trusts God sleeps easy and the person who does not wakes heavy, and anybody who told you that has never sat in a dark room at five twelve counting the fan blades. Fear is a body doing what it was made to do. It is not a verdict on your soul.

Now let me show you who else was awake early.

The man who wrote this had watched his city burn. Not a metaphor. Jerusalem, sacked, the walls down, people starving in the streets, and he wrote five poems about it and did not soften one line of them. He says his own soul is bowed down in him. He says he has forgotten what happiness is. Right in the middle of that, without one word of pretending, he writes this.

It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22 and 23

New every morning.

Sit with the timing of that, because the timing is the whole gift. He did not say mercy arrives at nine when you have got your face on. He did not say it comes after you have sorted your thinking out, or after the inventory comes back clean, or once you have talked yourself down. New every morning. Which means it was already in the room at five twelve. Which means it got there before the dread did.

That is an order of arrival, and it matters more than it sounds. Lamentations 3:23 fixes the order. The Spirit does not read that line to you from a distance either; He is in the room where the fan is going, which is why something written over a burnt city lands on an ordinary Tuesday.

You have been assuming that the first thing over your day was the weight, and that everything after it is you trying to climb back up to level. But the weight is not the first thing over your day. Mercy is. His compassion was renewed over you while you were still asleep and unable to do a single thing about it, and it was sitting there in the dark waiting for you the same as the dread was, only quieter, because that is His way and it always has been.

And notice the man saying it. He is not a man whose situation had improved. Nothing in his city was fixed when he wrote that line. He is standing in rubble and reporting the sunrise. Which tells you that this mercy is not a report on how your circumstances are going. It is a report on His character, and His character got up early.