Awake and Already Behind

I want to talk about the first ninety seconds.

Not what you do in them. What arrives in them, before you have done anything at all.

For a lot of people, and I think you are one of them or you would have closed this by now, what arrives is a sense of being behind. Not a list, exactly. A weight, and it is there before the feet are on the floor, and it has a shape like debt.

Here is what makes it strange. Nothing has happened yet. The day is entirely unspent. There is no possible way to be behind on a thing that has not begun, and yet the feeling is not mistaken about anything in particular, which is why it cannot be argued with.

I have sat with a lot of people who carry this and I want to say two things about it before we go anywhere near a verse.

The first is that it is not a character flaw. It is what happens to a person who has been running a deficit for a long stretch. The arrears from yesterday do not get cleared overnight, and so they are simply there in the morning, and after a few years the mind stops distinguishing between yesterday's arrears and today's account and just presents a total.

The second is that no amount of getting up earlier has ever fixed it, because it is not about the hour. A person who wakes at five owing the day something wakes at five owing the day something.

Written in the worst week

Lamentations is a book of poems about a city that has been destroyed. It is not a gentle book and it does not resolve.

In the middle of the third poem, the writer says this.

They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. (Lamentations 3:23)

I want you to notice where that sentence is. It is not in a psalm of celebration written on a good day. It is in the middle of a book of grief, and the verses immediately before it are about being filled with bitterness and having a soul removed far off from peace.

He is not in a good week. He is in the worst week his nation has ever had. And what he reports is that something arrives every morning anyway.

Read the verb. They are new. Present tense, not promised. Not they will be new when things improve. New every morning, in this morning, the one he is actually in, the one that is part of the catastrophe.

You are handed something new every single morning, and it was never issued on the basis of how yesterday went. Lamentations 3:23 puts that sentence inside a book of grief rather than a book of thanksgiving, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it arrive as fact rather than as encouragement.

Now, the word behind them, which is the one that matters for a person waking up in debt.

Mercies, which are not wages

The word translated mercies is about compassion. It is not a word about payment.

That distinction is everything for the feeling we are discussing. A wage is something calculated from what you did. A mercy is something given because of who is giving it, and its size has no relationship at all to the performance of the person receiving it.

So the arithmetic that produces the morning weight is not wrong so much as it is running on the wrong ledger. It is calculating a wage. Yesterday was short, so today opens short, and the total carries.

But that is not the ledger God is on, and the verse says so with the word it chooses.

It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. (Lamentations 3:22)

Not consumed. That is what the man in the poem thinks the actual danger is, and he attributes his survival to compassion rather than to his own account being in order.

You have a morning that opens at nothing owed, and the balance was never carried across. Lamentations 3:22 credits survival itself to compassions that do not fail rather than to a person keeping up. The Spirit of God is the one who can move somebody off a ledger they have been keeping for years.

The ninety seconds themselves

So here is the practical part, and it is small enough to actually happen.

The feeling arrives before you can do anything about it. That is fine. It is not going to be prevented and I am not asking you to prevent it.

What I am asking is that something arrives after it, and that the something is out loud.

I owe this day nothing yet.

Say it before you get up. Not as a mantra and not as positive thinking, which is a thing I have no use for. Say it because it is factually true. The day is unspent. Nothing has been failed in it. Whatever was true of yesterday, this particular morning has nothing in it yet.

You are permitted to say a true sentence over a day before it starts, and it has never once been optimism to state a fact. Lamentations 3:23 has a man in ruins report something new arriving in the morning he is actually in, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a spoken sentence go deeper than the feeling that got there first.

You have a voice of your own in that room, and it was given to you before the weight ever moved in. Lamentations 3:22 has a man speak truth into his own despair in the middle of the same poem. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a sentence said out loud carry further than the one that arrived on its own.

I want to be honest that the feeling will still be there on the way to the kitchen. This is not a technique for making it go. It is a way of not being the only voice in the room, and after a while the second voice starts arriving on its own.