Before The Phone

The alarm is the phone. That is the first problem and she has known it for four years.

So the hand goes out at ten past six and turns off the sound, and the thumb, which is not under anybody's authority at ten past six, does the rest. Eleven minutes. Sometimes nineteen. Two messages that needed nothing, a video of a dog that was genuinely funny, a headline about a place she will never go, a photograph of a kitchen belonging to a woman she went to school with, and a small flat feeling underneath all of it like the taste of a coin.

Then she is properly awake, and the day has already told her what it thinks of her, and she gets up.

She has decided eleven times to pray first. She has counted, because she is the sort of person who counts.

She has kept it, in total, six days.

The pattern is always the same and it is almost funny. She decides on a Sunday, when she is full of it. She manages Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday she is tired, and she reasons, quite sensibly, that God is not counting and it is fine, which is true. Thursday she does not think about it at all. On Friday she remembers at eleven in the morning at her desk and feels the small hot drop of shame, and by Saturday the whole project has quietly ended, and she is not even upset, she is just embarrassed at herself for the eleventh time.

The last time she talked to anybody about it they told her to want it more.

She has thought about that sentence a lot since. She does want it. She has wanted it every one of those eleven Sundays, with everything she had, and wanting has produced six days in four years.

The psalm names a time, not a mood

Sit down with your coffee for a minute, because I want to show you what the psalm actually says, and I want you to notice one word that changes what you have been trying to do. This is not my advice. It is the written word, and the Holy Spirit is the one who breathed it.

My voice shalt Thou hear in the morning, O Lord; in the morning will I direct my prayer unto Thee, and will look up.Psalm 5:3

Morning. Twice.

Not when it rises up. Not when the heart is ready. Not when a person feels able. A time of day, named out loud, said twice in one verse as though the writer knew somebody would try to make it about feelings.

Hear this over your kitchen counter. You are not a woman with a discipline problem, and the written word is what tells me so, not politeness. Scripture hands you an hour rather than a mood, and the Holy Spirit who breathed that psalm knew exactly how much a tired person can decide at ten past six, which is nothing at all.

Now, the eleven Sundays. Let me tell you what went wrong, because it was never your wanting.

You built a plan that required a decision every single morning. And a decision at ten past six, made by a person who is not yet a person, against a phone engineered by very clever people to be picked up, is not a fair fight, and you have lost it fifteen hundred times and concluded something about your character. Nothing written in Scripture asked you to win that fight, and the Holy Spirit was never waiting behind it.

The old way around this is so simple it sounds like a trick. You do not decide in the morning. You decide once, and then the hour decides.

That is the whole idea underneath a rhythm of prayer that has carried plain people for centuries: a fixed time, a short form, and no requirement that you feel anything whatever when it comes round. Somebody worked out, a long time ago, that the ploughman was not going to manage a devotional life on inspiration, and so they gave him a clock instead of a mood.

Hear this too, because the shame has been feeding on the opposite. You have not failed at prayer eleven times. You have failed at a method that Scripture never gave you, and the Spirit of God has not once counted those Wednesdays against you, because what is written sets a time and never once sets a standard of enthusiasm to be met before the time counts.

And now the phone, because we have to be practical.

The reason it wins is not that it is stronger than God. It is that it is nearer than your intention, and it is in your hand before your will is awake. That is a matter of geography, not devotion.

So change the geography. Put the thing across the room, or in the hall, or in a drawer, and buy a clock for two pounds. Then the first thing your hand finds in the morning is not a machine that has been built to take eleven minutes off you.

That is not a spiritual triumph. That is a shelf being moved. Half of what people call discipline is furniture.

And hear this last thing, because it is the piece that will keep you steady on the first bad Wednesday. You are already in Christ before you have prayed a word tomorrow, and the written word is what settles that, and the Holy Spirit is not withheld from a woman who overslept. What you are building is not access. Access is finished. What you are building is a place to put your face every day, and a place is a small thing to build and it holds a great deal.