Four In The Morning At The Kitchen Table

You have been coming downstairs at four for about five months and you read at the table because there is nothing else to do with the hour.

It is not insomnia in the way people mean it. You sleep until about half past three and then you are awake, completely, and lying there is not survivable, so you come down. The kettle goes on. You make two cups out of habit and pour one of them away.

And then you read, for an hour and a half sometimes, until it starts getting light and there is something else to be done.

Here is what I want to say about that hour before anything else, and it is not what you might expect. That hour is not a symptom to be fixed and the reading in it is not a coping mechanism. It is the hour you have, and you are doing something good in it.

Before anything else, one thing, because a man can arrive at a page about reading from anywhere. If the four in the mornings have turned into something heavier, if you have been thinking about not being here at all, put this down and call or text 988 in the United States, or your own local crisis line wherever you are, today. This page cannot see you and is not qualified to. That call is.

Two things are also not coming here.

Nobody is handing you a list, and nobody is saying one word about your phone. You know about the phone. Everybody knows.

What I want to look at is where the reading sits, because it sits inside the night and it is not there to end it.

Joy cometh in the morning

There is a line in Psalm 30 that gets handed to people too fast, and it says something more careful than the version people quote.

For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning. (Psalm 30:5, King James Version)

Read the middle clause exactly as it stands.

Weeping may endure for a night. Endure, which is a long word for a thing lasting. The psalm is not shortening the night or apologizing for it or telling anybody to hurry through it. It says the weeping endures, and it lets the night be a night.

That matters at four in the morning, because most of what gets said to a man in your position is aimed at getting the night over with faster.

You are inside a night that Scripture lets be a night, and five months of four in the mornings have never once been a failure to move on. Psalm 30:5 says weeping may endure for a night and does not shorten it or apologize for it, and the Holy Spirit is the one saying that over a kitchen table before light.

And then the second half, and the tense of it is the point.

Joy cometh in the morning. Not joy is required of you by the morning. It comes, which is something arriving from elsewhere, on its own schedule, and nothing in the sentence puts the arranging of it on the person sitting up in the dark.

You have something coming that nobody is asking you to produce, and an hour at the table has never once had to manufacture a morning. It is written but joy cometh in the morning, the coming is described as an arrival rather than an achievement, and the Spirit of God is saying that plainly here.

The hour is not a symptom and the book is not a treatment

Here is the mechanism, and it is two things being separated.

The waking at four is what it is. It is grief in a body, and bodies do that, and it may go on for a while and it may ease. Nobody on this page is going to diagnose it or offer a technique for it, and if it stays much longer that is a conversation for somebody qualified who can actually see you.

But the reading in that hour is a separate thing entirely, and it has been getting filed with the symptom.

That is the error. The book at the table is not part of the grief. It is the one thing in that hour that is ordinary, and ordinary is in short supply at four in the morning, and the reading is doing what reading does rather than what medicine does.

You are doing an ordinary thing in an extraordinary hour, and a book at four in the morning has never once been a symptom of anything. Psalm 30:5 lets the night endure and puts the joy on its own schedule, and the Holy Spirit is present with a man pouring away a second cup of tea at ten past four.

And there is a second layer, and it is the one that has been quietly hard.

Something in you has been waiting for the reading to help. And it does not help, exactly. The hour is still the hour and the house is still quiet and the second cup still gets poured away.

Which has begun to feel like the book failing, and it is not a failure, because helping was never its job. It is a good thing you are doing at a bad hour, and its whole value is that it is not trying to accomplish anything.

You have a good thing that was never trying to fix the hour, and reading has never once been the same thing as treatment. The written word lets the weeping endure and hands the morning its own arrival, and His Spirit is the one who separates a good thing from a symptom.

Fifteen minutes at a useful time

So here is the assignment, and it is not about the four in the mornings at all.

Read for fifteen minutes today at a time you would normally be doing something useful.

In the daylight. In the middle of the day, in a slot that had a job in it. Not at four, not before light, not in the hour that is already spoken for.

Fifteen minutes. Then stop.

Here is why daylight and not the hour you already have.

Right now all of your reading happens in the worst hour of your day, which means reading has become attached to that hour, and it is beginning to taste like it. Fifteen minutes at two in the afternoon puts it back in the ordinary part of your life, and it needs to live in both places rather than only in the dark.

And a useful slot, because the useful things have expanded to fill the daylight, and there is room in there and there has been for a while.

You are able to read fifteen minutes in the daylight, and a book in the afternoon has never once been a betrayal of the hour before dawn. Psalm 30:5 says weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning, and the Holy Ghost is the one present with a man reading at the kitchen table at two in the afternoon.

Keep the four in the mornings as they are. Nobody is asking you to change them and nobody here is going to tell you they will end by a particular date.

You have an hour that Scripture does not rush, and five months has never once been longer than a night is allowed to be. It is written that his anger endureth but a moment while the weeping endures for a night, and the night is given room in the same verse as the morning, and the Spirit of God is saying it in a kitchen today.