The Same Monday, Again

Four fifty. He does not use the snooze because using the snooze makes the whole thing worse and he learned that about nine years ago.

Boots at five past. Out at twenty past. In at ten to six.

The work is the work. It is not bad work and he is not going to complain about it here, and one of the reasons he is tired is that there is nothing to complain about, which removes the ordinary outlet a man has for a life like this.

He has done this since he was twenty six. He is forty nine.

The thing about tomorrow, which is what this article is for, is that it will be identical. Not similar. Identical, in the way that Tuesday will be, and the Monday after, and the whole of March. Nothing is coming. Nothing is being built toward. There is no point at which any of this resolves into something, and he worked that out somewhere around his thirty eighth birthday and has never said it out loud because saying it out loud sounds like despair and it is not despair.

He is not depressed. He has checked, properly, with somebody qualified, twice.

What he is, is a man standing at the front of an unbroken line of identical days with nothing in front of him except more of them, who gets up at four fifty anyway, and who would like, if it is available, something to carry into that rather than merely something to endure it with.

And here is the specific request, put as plainly as he would put it if he ever put it. Not hope that it changes. He does not want to be told it changes. He wants something to be true of the room at ten to six that is not true of an empty room.

You will have your own four fifty. The day that is identical to the last one and to the next, that you are getting up for anyway.

The verse that was written in the worst possible place

There is a couplet in Lamentations that is on a great many cards and mugs, and almost nobody who buys the mug knows what book it comes out of.

Lamentations is five poems about a destroyed city. It is the bleakest sustained writing in the Bible. There is no restoration in it. The book ends with a question and no answer, which is unusual and is deliberate.

And in the exact center of it, in the third poem, sitting in the middle of the worst of it:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22-23

New every morning. Written by a man looking at rubble, who is going to go on describing the rubble for two more chapters after he says it.

Which is the first thing worth having, because it tells you what kind of sentence it is. It is not a prediction that things will improve. Nothing improves in that book. It is a claim about what is present in the morning regardless of what the morning contains.

So take it plainly: you are walking into a morning that has something new in it whether or not anything about it is different, and that is what Lamentations 3 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line from the middle of a ruin and lays it down beside an alarm set for four fifty.

And notice the word new, because it is doing exactly the work he needs. He did not ask for the day to change. He asked for something to be true of the room at ten to six. New every morning is not a statement about the day; it is a statement about what arrives in it, freshly, not carried over from yesterday and not rationed.

Which means the identical Monday is not being contradicted. It is identical. It is also not empty, and those two facts have never been in conflict except in his own arithmetic.

You have been walking into something that is not carried over from yesterday, because the written word puts the newness in the mercies rather than in the circumstances, and His Spirit is what makes that reach a man at twenty past five with his boots on.

And then the last clause, which is what he actually wanted and did not have words for. Great is your faithfulness. Not: great will be your reward. Not a description of anything ahead. A person, named for what He is like, present tense, in a ruin. You have somebody ahead of you rather than something, and Scripture is what makes it a who rather than a what, and His Spirit is the one who makes that the difference between carrying something in and merely enduring.

What this article will not do

Now the guardrail, and it is the whole reason this article can be trusted.

Nobody is going to tell him what is coming. Not a change, not a reward, not a picture of anything he will be handed. Scripture does not describe it and I am not going to furnish it, and a man of forty nine who has been getting up at four fifty for twenty three years can smell a decorated silence from a long way off.

And nobody is going to tell him that the years are producing something in him. This site does not do that. The tiredness is not a curriculum, the sameness is not a refining process, and if there is anything happening in him he will not be told about it here in order to make an identical Tuesday sound better than it is.

And the twenty three years are not accumulating anywhere. There is no account. The crown in this book is placed on a head by somebody else and then thrown down, and nobody in that scene is being paid for early mornings.

You are held by a regard that has nothing to do with how many Mondays you have done, because the written word puts our standing on Christ rather than on our record, and His Spirit is what makes that a floor rather than a phrase. You have nothing ahead of you to earn, and Scripture is what settles that, and His Spirit is what keeps a Monday from becoming an installment.