The Morning Does Not Get to Decide

Six twelve, and the room is still the color of dishwater.

She is awake before the alarm, because she is always awake before the alarm now. She lies very still with both hands flat on the duvet and she does not move yet, because the second she moves she will know.

Then she does the thing nobody in this house has ever watched her do. One leg comes out from under the covers. The heel finds the carpet. And then, slowly, the way you test ice on a pond in February, she gives it a little weight. A stone of it. Then three. Then she waits.

The knee answers.

It is the same courtroom every day and it sits at the same hour, and by twenty past six the whole day has been handed down. Good morning: the shops are possible, the stairs are possible, she can stand long enough to make a proper dinner and not just something on toast. Bad morning: cancel the coffee, ring her daughter with a bright voice and a reason that is not the real reason, take the shower sitting on the stool, leave the washing basket at the top of the stairs for tomorrow.

She has stopped saying yes to anything more than two days out. That is the part that would sound small to anybody else. She used to agree to things six weeks ahead without even checking, and now there is a birthday in October written in her calendar with a question mark beside it in pencil, and the pencil is the whole story.

Downstairs the kettle goes on. She holds the edge of the counter while it boils, which she also does not mention, and she looks out at the garden and does the arithmetic. Bins. Post office. That step at the front of the church with no rail on the left side.

And underneath all of it there is a sentence she has never once said out loud, not to her daughter, not to the doctor, not to God.

I do not know who I am on a bad morning.

Now I am going to stop calling her she.

Because you know that hour. You know the exact half second between the weight going down and the answer coming up. You know what your face does when the answer is not the one you were hoping for, and you know that nobody in your house has ever seen that face, because you fix it before you come out of the bedroom door. You have been living on a permission slip issued by a joint. You did not apply for that arrangement and nobody ever asked you to sign it.

Come and sit down here beside me a minute. I want to tell you what your knee actually is. And what it is not.

Your knee is telling the truth. It is not telling the future.

I am not going to hurry past your morning to get to the encouraging part, because your morning is real and pretending it is not would be a strange way to love you.

Your knee is not lying to you. It hurts. On the bad days it genuinely cannot carry what you are asking it to carry, and the tiredness that comes off pain like heat off a radiator is not weakness of character, it is just what pain costs. And the losses are real losses. The lunch you did not go to. The grandchild you watched from a chair. The way people have quietly stopped inviting you, not out of unkindness, but because they got tired of the maybe and you got tired of the explaining.

So here is the first true thing, and it stands on Isaiah 35 rather than on a brave mood. Your knee is a witness. Witnesses tell the truth about what happened. They do not get to sentence anybody, and the Spirit who is in that room at six twelve has never once taken dictation from a joint.

And somewhere in the last few years the witness climbed up onto the bench, and you let it, because it seemed to know so much. It knew about Tuesday before you did. It knew about the stairs. It knew whether you were going to be a person who does things today or a person who is careful today, and after enough mornings you stopped arguing and started taking dictation.

Now hear what the God of the whole earth says over knees.

Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those of a fearful heart, be strong, do not fear. Behold, your God is coming. He will come and save you.Isaiah 35:3 and 4

Notice who He is talking about. Not the strong. Feeble knees, weak hands, a frightened heart. That is not a metaphor tucked into the poetry. That is a physical inventory of the exact people He is aiming His comfort at, and He names the knee. He names it. Out of everything in the human body He could have picked to speak over, the God who spoke light into being looks at a room full of hurting people and says the word knees out loud.

And then, three lines later, He tells you what He is like.

Then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute shall sing for joy. For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert.Isaiah 35:6

Look at where the water comes from. The wilderness. Not the river valley. Not the well kept garden. The place with no history of water at all, the place where every single morning for years has said the same dry thing, and God does not tidy the wilderness up first. He breaks water out of it.

I am not going to stand here and tell you what your knee will be like on Thursday. I do not know that, and anybody who tells you they do is selling you a certainty that is not theirs to hand out. But I will tell you what I do know, and it is better than a forecast. The heart of God is not neutral about your body. He is not indifferent to the stairs. He is not waiting for you to be more spiritual about it. When He describes the day He is bringing, He does not describe better attitudes toward pain. He describes leaping.

That is what your Father is like. That is His instinct. Toward bodies, toward joints, toward the ones who have gone quiet. Isaiah 35 promised it long before your first bad morning came round, and His Spirit brings it as near as the counter you hold onto while the kettle boils.

And while you wait for what only He can do, let me say the practical thing plainly, once, because love is practical. Keep the appointment. Take what you have been prescribed, exactly as they told you. Use the stick, use the rail, use the stool in the shower. None of that is a lack of faith and I will not have anyone suggest to you that it is. God works through skilled hands in clinics constantly, and refusing help has never once been the same thing as trusting Him.