The Watch You Kept Without Feeling It

Nights again from Sunday. Four in a row, then two off, then two on, then the pattern breaks because somebody is on leave.

She has done this for nine years and she is good at it. The body has learned. She gets home at half past seven in the morning, has something that is not really breakfast and is not really dinner, sleeps until half past three, and gets up into a house that is bright and warm and full of somebody else's afternoon.

The devotional she was given at Christmas is called Morning by Morning.

She has tried it eleven ways. She has tried it at half past seven, coming in, and fallen asleep on the second page. She has tried it at half past three with a headache like a coat. She tried getting up at eleven for it once and lost the rest of the week.

Somewhere along the line she stopped trying and started carrying a low, permanent sense that she is a second class believer with a first class rota.

Here is the thing she has never said out loud. She prays constantly. In the car park at twenty past seven with the engine ticking. Over a woman in bay four at ten past three in the morning, silently, with her hand on the rail. In the corridor with the lights down. She has prayed more genuine words at three in the morning in nine years than most people manage in a life.

None of it counts, in her head, because it is not a morning.

On Tuesday somebody at church says, warmly, with no idea at all what they have done: the secret is really just giving Him the first part of your day.

She says: yes. Absolutely.

And she goes home and sleeps until half past three.

He rose at the free edge of His own day

Sit down with your tea, because I want to look at the verse everybody quotes at you, and I want you to notice what it actually says.

And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, He went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed.Mark 1:35

Now, why then?

Read what happens either side of it. The night before, the whole town is at the door. All of it. The sick, the possessed, the curious, everybody, until late. And afterwards, before the sun is properly up, the disciples come hunting for Him because a crowd is already forming again.

That hour was not chosen because dawn is holy. It was chosen because it was the only edge of that day that was not already spoken for.

Hear this in your bright kitchen at half past three in the afternoon. You are not a second class believer, and the written word is what tells me so. Scripture shows the Lord Jesus taking the free edge of His own working life, and the Holy Spirit who met Him in that solitary place is the one standing at half past three in your afternoon with the kettle going.

Now let me deal with the sentence from Tuesday, because it has been sitting in you all week.

The first part of your day. That phrase is nowhere in the written word as a rule and it is everywhere in it as a picture. The picture is: before the world gets its hands on you, before the pull begins, at the edge where you are still your own, with the Holy Spirit meeting you there. For most people that is dawn. For you it is a quarter to four in the afternoon.

Your morning is at four in the afternoon. Say it like that and the whole problem dissolves.

And hear this too, because it is the part with real weight in it. You have been keeping a watch for nine years without ever giving yourself credit for it. What is written calls the night hours a watch, and men in Scripture kept them and were counted faithful for it, and the Spirit of God has been beside you in bay four at ten past three in the morning every single time, and He was not filing those prayers under something lesser because the clock was wrong.

Think about who else has kept those hours.

Shepherds in a field at night, who got the announcement before anybody in the country. A church praying in a house at midnight while Peter was in prison. Watchmen on a wall, told to cry out at intervals through the dark. The whole of Scripture is full of people awake at the hours you work, and not one of them is described as being at a disadvantage.

Somebody, centuries ago, wrote prayers for exactly this: a form for the night hours, said by people who were up when the rest of the parish was asleep. They were not making a concession for shift workers. They understood that the night is a shift somebody has always had to work, and that God is not asleep during it.