The Hour That Was Already Yours

He is up at ten past four and he does not need an alarm any more, which everyone says like it is a compliment.

The boat goes when the boat goes. Then there is the running, and the sorting, and the ice, and the two hours nobody counts that happen after the part people think of as the work. Then the gear. Then the thing that is broken, because on any given day one thing is broken.

He gets in when he gets in.

Somebody at the church said to him, in the nicest possible way, that he needs to make time. Carve out a space. Get up a bit earlier and give God the first part of the day.

He did not say anything back, because there was nothing to say that would not have come out wrong. Get up a bit earlier than ten past four. Give God the first part of a day that begins in the dark and ends in the dark and does not have a spare hour anywhere in it, not one, not on a Tuesday and not in August.

He has thought about it a lot since, though, and the thought has gone somewhere bad.

He has decided, quietly, that people like him are not really built for the praying kind of life. That it is for those with time. That his lot is to work and be tired and hope that counts for something.

Tonight he is standing at the end of the quay at half past eight with the light going amber off the water and his hands still stinging, and everything is put away, and there is a moment before he walks up to the van where he is simply standing there, and the whole harbor is gold, and he does not have a single word to say about it.

He walks up to the van.

Three hours in a working day, and none of them were free

Stand still on the quay another minute, because the psalm that set the whole rhythm was not written by a man with time on his hands.

Evening, and morning, and at noon, will I pray, and cry aloud: and He shall hear my voice.Psalm 55:17

Three hours. Evening, morning, noon.

Now look at what he did not say. He did not say I shall find a quiet period. He did not say when the season eases. He named the three hinges that every working day has anyway: the start, the middle, the end. Those hours were coming whether he prayed in them or not.

That is the whole mechanism and it has been carrying laboring people for three thousand years. You are not asked to buy an hour. You are asked to stand inside one that arrives on its own.

Hear this on the quay with your hands still stinging. You are not the wrong kind of man for this. The written word puts prayer at the hinges of a working day rather than in the gaps of a comfortable one, and the Holy Spirit has been standing in every one of those hinges since long before anybody told you to carve out a space.

Now let me take that phrase apart, because it has done you real damage and it is not in the Book.

Make time. Carve out a space. Give God the first part of the day. Whoever said it meant well, and for some people it describes something true, and for you it landed as a bill you cannot pay.

But the old rhythm was never designed for people with spare time. It was designed for a parish full of people whose days were like yours: up before light, in from the field after dark, animals that do not care what day it is. Somebody put the prayers at dawn and at dusk precisely because those two moments happen to everybody, without arrangement, free of charge, in every life on earth.

The hour was never something you were supposed to produce. It is the one thing in your day that arrives without you.

Hear this too, and let it settle in your chest. You are not further from God than the man with a study and a comfortable chair. Scripture puts the crying aloud at noon in the middle of a working day, and the Spirit of God is not more present in quiet rooms than on wet boards, and what is written never once rated a prayer by the leisure of the one praying.

And now the thing on the quay tonight, because you were nearer than you knew.

You stood at the end of the boards at half past eight with the whole harbor going gold and nothing to say. You have called that having no words. The written word would call it a man standing at the exact hour the psalm names, in the exact posture the psalm describes, one sentence short of the evening office, with the Holy Spirit standing on the boards beside him.

You were not far off it. You were in it, and you walked up to the van because nobody had ever told you that standing there counted.