Put It on the Far Side of the Room

Let me describe your morning and you tell me if I am wrong.

The hand goes out before the eyes open. It does not consult anybody. There is no moment where a decision is made, because the deciding part of a person is not awake yet, and the hand has done this several thousand times and does not need supervision.

Twenty minutes later you are still there, and you have read some things, and you feel slightly worse than when you woke, and you cannot point to the thing that made it so.

And then, at some point in the day, you resolve to do better tomorrow.

I want to talk about that resolution, because I think it is the actual problem.

You are trying to win, with willpower, a contest that takes place before willpower has arrived at work. That is not a fair fight and you have lost it every morning for a long time, and each loss has been quietly filed as evidence about your character.

It is not evidence about your character. It is evidence about arm length.

A man asking for the morning

Psalm 143 is written by somebody in real trouble. He says his spirit is overwhelmed and his heart is desolate, and then, near the end, he asks for something specific.

Cause me to hear thy lovingkindness in the morning; for in thee do I trust. (Psalm 143:8)

Cause me to hear.

He does not say I will hear. He does not promise to try harder in the morning. He asks God to cause it, which is the request of a man who knows his own strength is not the deciding factor.

And I find that enormously freeing, because it takes the whole business out of the category of self improvement.

He is not resolving. He is asking. And he asks about the morning specifically, which suggests the morning was a known difficulty long before anybody had a device.

You are allowed to ask for a morning rather than fight for one, and it was never a contest of strength. Psalm 143:8 has a man ask God to cause him to hear rather than promise to listen harder, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as wisdom instead of as excuse making.

Now, here is where I part company with a certain kind of teaching.

Asking God to cause it does not mean sitting still and waiting for a feeling. In my experience He causes things through arrangements, and an arrangement is a very ordinary thing that a person sets up the night before while they still have their wits about them.

You have a God who works through ordinary furniture, and He was never confined to the dramatic. Psalm 143:8 has a man ask for a morning and then go on living an ordinary one. The Holy Spirit is the one who is as present in a chair across a room as in anything a person would call spiritual.

Six steps of floor

Here is the arrangement, and it is not clever.

Put it on the far side of the room. Not under the bed, not in a drawer beside you, not face down on the same surface. Across the room, where getting it requires standing up.

That is the whole intervention.

I want to explain why it works, because it is not about temptation.

The reach is automatic. Automatic actions run on availability, not on desire. If the object is within arm's reach, the reach happens and no decision is involved. If the object is six steps away, then getting it requires standing, and standing requires being upright, and being upright wakes the part of you that makes decisions.

You have not won a battle of will. You have arranged the room so that the battle happens after you are awake instead of before, and a person who is awake has completely different equipment.

You have a way to move a fight to ground you can actually stand on, and the arrangement was always allowed. Psalm 143:8 has a man ask for a morning to be caused rather than achieved, and the Spirit of God is the one who works through ordinary arrangements a person makes the night before.

The four minutes you get back

Something happens in those first minutes when the object is not to hand, and I want to tell you what it is so that you recognize it rather than fill it.

Nothing happens. That is what happens.

You will be awake, in a room, with nothing to read. It is a very unfamiliar sensation for most people now and it can feel like an error. There will be an impulse to get up immediately and start the day, purely to end the strangeness.

Do not. Stay there for a minute or two. Not to meditate and not to pray in any organized way, though pray if you want to.

The reason to stay is that this is the only unclaimed part of your day and it has been claimed by something else for years.

My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O Lord. (Psalm 5:3)

His voice in the morning is in the psalms twice over, and both times the morning is described as a place where something is heard rather than a place where something is achieved.

You are given a few minutes at the front of a day that belong to nobody, and they were yours before anything got there first. Psalm 143:8 asks for lovingkindness to be heard in the morning specifically. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present in four minutes that a person has not filled.