Something Other Than the Day's Demands

Before your eyes are open, something has already been counted.

Not consciously. It runs on its own. A quick pass over what is undone, what is owed, what will be difficult today, what was difficult yesterday and is still there. It takes almost no time and it is remarkably thorough.

I want to be careful with how I describe it, because it is not anxiety and I have no intention of calling it that. It is an inventory. A stocktake. It is the mind doing something reasonable, and it is doing it before you have any say in the matter.

And I want to ask a question about it that I do not think you will be able to answer quickly.

When did a morning last begin with something other than that?

Not a good morning. Not a holiday. An ordinary Tuesday that opened with something other than a count of what is outstanding.

Most people cannot remember. Not because their mornings are terrible, but because the inventory is so quiet and so fast that it does not register as an event. It is simply what waking up is.

I want to suggest it is not what waking up is. It is what waking up has become, and that is a different sentence with something in it that can change.

An ear, wakened

Isaiah 50 has a passage about a servant, and there is a line in it that is easy to read past and very strange when you stop.

The Lord God hath given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary: he wakeneth morning by morning, he wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learned. (Isaiah 50:4)

He wakeneth mine ear.

Not his body. Not his diary. His ear, and it is done to him rather than by him, and it happens morning by morning, which means it is a repeated arrangement rather than a single event.

That is a completely different picture of a morning from the one most people have. In this verse, the first thing that happens is not a person taking stock. It is a person being woken to listen.

You are woken to hear before you are asked to produce, and that order was in place long before it was your morning. Isaiah 50:4 has the ear opened morning by morning as something done rather than achieved, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as gift instead of as one more thing to get right.

And notice what the listening is for, because the verse says. That I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary.

The listening in the morning is what makes the person useful later in the day, to somebody who is tired. So even the practical value of it is not about the person doing the listening. It is about what they will have to give to somebody else at four in the afternoon.

You have a morning that is being furnished for somebody you have not met yet, and the furnishing was never for you alone. Isaiah 50:4 ties the wakened ear directly to a word for the weary later on. The Spirit of God is the one who fills a person early for a conversation they cannot see coming.

Why the inventory always wins

The inventory wins because it does not need anything from you.

It is automatic, it is fast, and it is running before consciousness fully arrives. Listening is not automatic. Listening requires a person to be present and still, which is exactly what nobody is at six in the morning.

So this is not a contest between a good habit and a bad one. It is a contest between something that requires nothing and something that requires four breaths.

Four breaths. That is the whole of what I am going to ask, and I want to be honest that it will feel like nothing is happening, because nothing will be happening, and that is the point.

The inventory is doing. Listening is not doing. And the reason it feels like failure is that a person accustomed to waking into an inventory has no other category for what a morning is for.

Be still, and know that I am God. (Psalm 46:10)

Be still is not an instruction about a room. It is an instruction about a person, and it is a rare kind of instruction because it asks for the removal of activity rather than the addition of it.

You are permitted to begin a day by receiving rather than by taking stock, and that permission was written into the morning itself. Isaiah 50:4 has the ear opened before the tongue is used, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can make four unproductive breaths feel like arriving instead of like idling.

What listening actually is here

I want to be plain about what I am not asking, because vagueness here produces guilt.

I am not asking you to receive a message. If God says something, wonderful, and He often does not, and that is not a failure of anybody's morning.

I am asking for four breaths in which nothing is being counted.

That is all listening means at six in the morning. Not straining after a word. Not emptying the mind, which I have never managed and do not recommend. Simply four breaths in which the inventory is not running, because something else has the room.

If a thought about the day arrives during them, and it will, let it go past and count the next breath. There is no score.

You have four breaths in you that nothing has a claim on, and they were there on every morning you have already had. Psalm 46:10 asks for stillness as the doorway to knowing rather than as a reward for it. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in four breaths where nothing is achieved.