The Mercy Was Already In The Room

Bridie has done nights for eleven years and she has a very precise relationship with seven in the morning.

Seven is when she hands over. Seven is when the day staff come in with wet hair and coffee and stories about the roadworks, and she stands there with a clipboard and a voice that has gone quiet from twelve hours of speaking softly, and she gives them the ward.

Then she walks out through the doors into a parking lot full of people arriving, and every single one of them is at the start of something and she is at the end of it, and that particular collision has never once stopped feeling strange.

She goes home. She has toast. She sleeps until three.

There was a woman on the ward last winter, an old woman called Peg, who was awake most nights and did not want the light on and did not want the television, and who talked to Bridie between two and four for about two weeks.

One night Peg asked her what she prayed about.

Bridie laughed and said she did not really, and then, because it was three in the morning and that is when the truth comes out sideways, she said the actual thing, which was that she had stopped years ago because she could never get it right. Everybody talks about the morning. Give Him the first hour. Meet Him before the day starts. And Bridie's day starts at four in the afternoon in a dark bedroom with the sound of somebody else's lawnmower coming through the window, and by then, apparently, she has already lost.

Peg was quiet for a bit. Then she said: "What time do you wake up?"

Bridie said about three.

And Peg said, "Then that's the morning, love. That's yours."

It is not much of a story. Peg went home in March and Bridie does not know what happened to her. But something in Bridie has been sitting with that sentence ever since, because in eleven years of feeling permanently disqualified, not one person had ever suggested that the word morning might mean the beginning of a person's own day rather than a time on a clock somebody else keeps.

You have been reading yourself out of this too. Maybe it is a shift schedule. Maybe it is a newborn who has never once heard of a schedule. Maybe it is pain that decides for you what time anything starts. And somewhere in there you concluded that the first belongs to people whose lives are shaped differently from yours, and nobody has said the thing Peg said at three in the morning.

New Every Morning Means New At Your Beginning

The most quoted line about mornings in the whole Bible was written by a man in a ruined city who was not having a good week or a good year.

"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 what the sentence is actually claiming. It is not making a rule about a time. It is describing a supply that does not run out and does not carry over, that is fresh at the beginning of a stretch, every stretch, for everybody.

That is a description of God's character and not a description of a schedule. The mercies are not on a timetable that starts at six and shuts at nine. They are new at the beginning, and your beginning is when you open your eyes.

You are not late for something that arrives when you do. Lamentations puts the freshness on His side and puts no hour on it anywhere, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line written among rubble and lands it in a woman standing in a parking lot at ten past seven going the wrong way against the traffic.

And notice where the man is standing when he says it. Everything he had is gone. He is not describing a well-ordered life with a good routine. He is describing the one thing he found that was still turning up, and he found it at the bottom.

You have been met at the bottom before, and the supply that met you there is the same one that is fresh whenever this day of yours begins. That is what the written word says about His compassions, and it is the Spirit of God who makes a sentence like that arrive as steadiness rather than as poetry.

The First Is An Order, Not An Hour

Here is the whole thing, and it is simpler than the way it has been handed to you.

The first is a position in a sequence. Not a position on a clock. It means before the others, not before six.

The oldest picture of it in Scripture is a farmer bringing the earliest fruit of a harvest. Earliest in the harvest. Nobody asked what time of day he picked it. The point was that it came before the rest of the crop, so that everything after it came after something that had already been named.

Apply that to a day and it stops being cruel. The first of your day is whatever your day starts with. If your day starts at four in the afternoon with a lawnmower going outside, then four in the afternoon is where the first is, and nothing whatever has been lost.

You were never disqualified by a shift schedule, a baby or a body that decides for you. Scripture puts no clock face on this anywhere, and His Spirit is the one who is quietly taking eleven years of a verdict off a person while she reads.

And hear the guard, because a good thing goes hard exactly here. Nothing on this page is a requirement. There is no length of time in it, no number of minutes, no habit you are being enrolled in, no schedule and nothing routed to anybody at all. If your beginning tomorrow is a scramble and nothing gets said, you are exactly as much His as you were this morning, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this from turning into one more thing to fail at.