New Every Morning, Felt or Not

It happens before his feet are on the floor, and it takes about four seconds, and he has never once decided to do it.

He wakes. And something in him takes a reading.

He could not tell you what it is measuring. It is not a mood exactly. It is nearer to a check of whether anything is there, a hand put against the wall of his own chest to see whether it is warm, and for about three years the answer has been the same, and the answer determines the shape of the whole day before he has stood up.

If there is nothing, and there is nothing, then it is a nothing day. Which means: he will do the day properly, because he is that sort of man. He will make the coffee and get his mother-in-law her tablets and be at the yard by seven and be decent to everybody in it. And underneath he will carry a grade he assigned himself at twenty past six.

He is forty-seven. He is not depressed, or not in a way anyone has been able to find, and he has been checked.

And nobody knows about the four seconds. His wife does not know. He has never described it, because described out loud it sounds like nothing at all, and it is not nothing. It is a thousand mornings in a row of starting the day by marking himself down.

Whose newness it is

There is a line in Lamentations that everybody knows off a card or a mug, and almost nobody reads for what it actually says about the morning.

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 3:22-23

Read the subject of the sentence. What is new every morning?

His compassions. His mercies. Not your capacity. Not the state of your heart at twenty past six. The thing being renewed nightly, without fail, is on God's side, and it arrives whether or not the man it is arriving for can detect it.

And notice the summary line the writer puts on it. Great is thy faithfulness. Thy. His. The verse concludes with an observation about God's reliability, not about the observer's condition.

You have been taking a reading of the wrong thing entirely, and the thing that is actually new each morning is not located in you. That is not me softening a hard three years; Lamentations 3:23 puts the newness on His compassions and nowhere else, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line written in the ruins of a city and lays it on a man's first four seconds.

What the reading is actually measuring

Now let me get at the four seconds, because I think you have misunderstood what you are doing.

You believe you are checking whether God is near. You are not. You cannot measure that, and no instrument in a human chest was ever built to. What you are checking is your own nervous system at the moment of waking, which is affected by sleep, by blood sugar, by whether the boiler woke you, and by about nine other things that have no theological content whatsoever.

And then you are treating that reading as a spiritual instrument and grading yourself on it.

You have been using a body as a gauge for a thing a body cannot detect. The written word puts God's faithfulness beyond the reach of a person's condition rather than inside it, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who has been issuing a grade at twenty past six.

Here is the other half, and it is the part I want you to keep. Look at where Lamentations was written. It is a book about a city that has been destroyed. The man writing it is not having a good week. He is not reporting a warm feeling; he is stating something about God in the middle of rubble, deliberately, against the evidence in front of his eyes.

That sentence was never a description of how the morning felt. It was always a statement about who God is, made by somebody who could not feel it either.

You are being met by mercies that arrived before you woke, and their arrival has never once been keyed to your reading of it. Scripture says His compassions fail not, with no clause about detection, and the Holy Spirit has been the one delivering them through a thousand mornings a man has graded as nothing.