The Ten Minutes Before The Alarm

You wake at ten past five most mornings and the alarm is set for twenty past, and every one of those ten minutes goes to the phone.

It is not a decision. Your eyes open, the room is dark, there is a stretch of time with nothing in it, and your hand goes to the nightstand and picks up the nearest object. Six inches away, no effort, screen already lit.

And you are not even enjoying it. That is what makes it strange. It is not pleasure, it is proximity. Ten minutes of headlines and other people's mornings, and then the alarm goes and the day starts slightly worse than it needed to.

Two things are not coming here, and you have met them both.

Nobody is handing you a list. Not a title, not an author, not a genre, and no shelf of what a woman ought to have read by now. Being handed one has never once opened a book, and mostly it adds one more thing to be behind on.

And nobody is scolding you about the phone. You know about the phone. Everybody knows about the phone, and being told again by a stranger returns nothing at all. There is no rule coming here about where it sleeps.

What I want to look at is distance, because I think this whole thing is a matter of inches.

Ten minutes is not going to the phone because the phone is compelling. It goes there because the phone is closer.

New every morning

There is a sentence in Lamentations 3 that sits inside the saddest book in the Bible, and the position of it is the point.

They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. (Lamentations 3:23, King James Version)

Look at where this is written. The city is destroyed. The book is a funeral for a nation. Nothing in the surrounding chapters is going well in any sense.

And in the middle of it there is a claim about mornings, and the claim is about supply rather than about feeling. His mercies are new every morning, which means every morning has something in it that was not there yesterday, and that is asserted in a book where nobody's circumstances improved.

You have a supply that does not wait for a good week, and a hand reaching for what is nearest has never once been a hand that chose. His Spirit is there when your eyes open, which is why the newness in Lamentations 3:23 is fastened to His faithfulness and to nothing else at all.

Now here is what that gives a woman awake at ten past five.

The morning has something in it before anything happens. Before the alarm, before the day is assessed, before anybody gets up. There is already something new there, and the ten minutes are not the leftover edge of yesterday.

You are waking into something new before your feet touch the floor, and ten minutes before an alarm has never once been the scraps of a day. Lamentations 3:23 puts new mercies into every morning inside a book about a destroyed city, and the Holy Spirit is the one saying that over a dark room at ten past five.

There is a second half and it names the reason.

Great is thy faithfulness. The newness is not produced by the morning going well. It is attached to His faithfulness, which means it arrives on the bad mornings at exactly the same rate as the good ones.

You have a morning that comes with something in it already, and a bad week has never once reduced what a morning is supplied with. It is written they are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness, the supply is tied to Him and not to the state of the city, and the Spirit of God is saying that plainly here.

It is inches, not willpower

Here is the mechanism, and once it is named it is almost insulting how simple it is.

At ten past five, a decision does not happen. What happens is a reach.

Your eyes open and there is no plan and no deliberation. The hand moves to whatever is within arm's length of the pillow, and the arm's length is the entire competition. Whatever wins that six inches gets the ten minutes, every single morning, for years.

The phone is at six inches. The book is on the shelf across the room, or downstairs, or in a bag, and the distance between six inches and across the room is not a distance a person crosses before the alarm has gone.

So this is not a contest between two activities. It is a contest between two positions, and the outcome has been decided by furniture.

You are losing a stretch of time to geometry, and ten minutes on a phone has never once meant you preferred the phone. Lamentations 3:23 puts something new in a morning before anybody has done anything, and the Holy Spirit is present with a woman whose hand knows the way to the nightstand in the dark.

And there is a second layer, which is why nothing has changed.

Because it feels like a willpower problem, the attempted fixes have all been about restraint. Do not look at it. Leave it in another room. And every one of those is a rule with a moral flavor, and rules with a moral flavor are hard to keep at five in the morning and easy to resent by Thursday.

Nothing here needs restraint. Something needs moving six inches.

You have a solution measured in inches rather than in resolve, and a rule about a phone has never once been what this required. The written word ties the new supply to His faithfulness rather than to anybody's discipline, and His Spirit is the one who takes a moral problem and shows it to be a practical one.

The book on the pillow

So here is the assignment, and where you put it is the whole of it.

Put the book on the pillow beside you tonight, and read ten pages in the morning before your feet touch the floor.

On the pillow. Not the nightstand, which is where the phone is and where a book will lose. Not the floor by the bed. On the other side of the bed, on the pillow, physically where your hand goes.

Then ten pages, sitting up, in the dark with the lamp on if it is dark, before anything else.

You are met with something new before your feet touch the floor, and ten minutes at five have never once been the leftovers of yesterday. The Holy Spirit is the one in that dark room with you, and Lamentations 3:23 puts new mercies into every morning of a book written over a ruined city.

Here is why the pillow and not the nightstand.

The competition is decided by proximity, so the book has to win proximity outright. Same distance is not enough; the book has to be closer, and the pillow is closer than the table. That is the whole intervention and there is nothing else in it.

And ten pages, because ten pages is about ten minutes at a normal pace, which means the assignment ends when the alarm goes and no discipline is required to stop.

You are able to win ten minutes by moving one object, and a stretch decided by furniture has never once been a stretch you had lost. Lamentations 3:23 says they are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness, and the Holy Ghost is the one present with a woman sitting up in the dark with a book in her hands.

Nothing about the phone has to change. Leave it exactly where it is. This is not a rule about the phone and there is no rule about the phone coming.

You have something new waiting in a morning that has not started yet, and ten minutes at the beginning has never once been worth less than an hour at the end. It is written great is thy faithfulness, the newness is delivered on the ruined mornings at the same rate as the good ones, and the Spirit of God is delivering here.