My Ten Minutes Are At Four In The Morning

Everything written about this assumes an evening.

After dinner. Before bed. When the children have gone up. Every article about a family doing anything is written for a household that is awake between six and ten at night and asleep the rest of the time.

You have not lived that week in eleven years.

You are on nights this month. Next month you are on the early rotation and you will be leaving the house at half past four in the morning. The month after that is something else again.

So when a thing says go out after dinner with your family, you are not refusing it. You are simply not in the category it was written for, and there is a quiet accumulation that happens over eleven years of not being in the category.

And here is the specific thing that has got to you, which is not tiredness.

It is the feeling that your hours are not real hours. That the time you have available at twenty past four in the morning is a leftover, an odd corner of a day, and that anything done in it is a sort of consolation version of the thing other people do properly at seven in the evening.

That is what I want to go at, because it is not true, and there is a verse that goes at it directly.

I prevented the dawning of the morning

There is a line in the longest psalm about a man who is up before anybody else, and it is not an apology.

I prevented the dawning of the morning, and cried: I hoped in thy word. (Psalm 119:147, King James Version)

I came before the dawning of the morning, and cried; I hoped in your word.

He was up before the light. Not because it was ideal. Because that was when it happened.

You have a psalm written from inside an odd hour, and Psalm 119:147 has never once treated the timing of it as second best. The verse records the hour without excusing it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who meets a person at whatever time they are actually awake.

You are able to hear how ordinary he makes it. There is no explanation and no apology for the strangeness of the hour, and no suggestion that the real thing happens at a more sensible time and this is what he could manage.

And the whole psalm is like this. He is up at night in one verse and at midnight in another. It is written by somebody whose life did not run on a normal schedule, and it is the longest chapter in the book.

The strange hours are not the setting for a lesser kind of life. They are simply the hours he had, and the book records them as the hours the work was done in.

You are able to do the real thing at four in the morning, and Psalm 119:147 has never once ranked the hours of the day against each other. The Spirit of God is the one who is awake at every hour there is, and the verse puts the crying and the hoping before the dawn without comment.

The category error in every article you read

Here is the correction, and it is about the writing rather than about you.

When something says after dinner, it does not mean after dinner. It means at the point in your day when the demands stop.

You have been reading an example as though it were an instruction, and Psalm 119:147 has never once made the clock the thing that matters. It is written that he came before the dawning of the morning, and the Holy Spirit is the one who finds the hour in a week nobody else could read.

Every household has a point where the pressure comes off. In an ordinary week that is about half past seven in the evening, so that is what gets written, because most people are in that week.

In your week it is at twenty past four before the early shift, or at nine in the morning when you come off nights and everybody else has gone, or at half past two in the afternoon in the middle rotation.

Those are the same point in the day. The number on the clock is different and nothing else is.

And here is the practical consequence, which is the reason this matters rather than just being reassuring. Because you have been reading yourself as outside the category, you have never actually looked for your version of the point. You dismissed the whole thing at the word evening, eleven years ago, and never went back.

You are able to find the point in your own week, and having a different clock has never once put you outside what everybody else is doing. The Spirit of God is the one who is present at twenty past four in the morning, and Psalm 119:147 does the work of that psalm before the light without apologizing for it.

Whatever hour it is, and whoever is awake

So here is the assignment.

Take the ten minutes at whatever hour they fall, outside the door, with whoever in the house is awake.

You are able to take the hour you have rather than the hour that gets written about, and the oddness of it has never once made it worth less. It is written that he prevented the dawning of the morning, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is out on a street with a man and whoever else in that house is up.

Whatever hour. Four in the morning, nine in the morning, half past two. It does not matter and there is no adjustment to be made for it.

And whoever is awake, which is the piece that makes this a family thing and not a solitary one. In your household that will not be everybody, and it will not be the same person twice.

A wife is up at four on the early rotation. An oldest who works evenings is the only person awake at nine in the morning coming off nights. There is somebody. There is nearly always somebody, and nobody has ever been asked, because nobody was looking for a version of this that fits.

Ask whoever is up. Not as a plan. Just: I am going out for ten minutes, come if you want.

You have somebody awake at your odd hour, and the fact that it is a different person each time has never once made it less of a household thing. Psalm 119:147 is written from inside an unusual hour, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in it.