The Hour Before The Alarm

Ten to five, most mornings, without an alarm and without a reason.

She has looked it up, which everybody does, and the internet had various opinions and none of them helped, and she has stopped looking it up.

What she cannot stop is the hour.

Because from ten to five until the alarm goes at ten to six, her mind does a thing that is very orderly and completely relentless. It goes over. Not catastrophizing, exactly. Reviewing. A conversation from Tuesday, and how it might have sounded. A form she has not filled in. Somebody's tone on the phone. The thing she has been not thinking about for two weeks, which arrives at about twenty past five without fail.

Sixty minutes. Every morning. For about eighteen months.

Now, somebody gave her something for this, and it was a kind and sensible somebody and the thing itself is not silly.

A morning routine. Get up rather than lie there. A particular chair. A passage a day in a particular order. A written list of three things to be thankful for. A specific way of praying with four parts to it that spell a word.

She did it for eleven weeks.

And here is the trouble, and it is the reason she is reading this rather than doing the four parts. The routine has joined the review. It is now one more thing in the hour that she is either doing correctly or failing at, and on the mornings she does not manage it she lies there at twenty past five feeling that she has begun the day already behind.

And you know that exactly, because something that was given to you to help has quietly become one more thing to get right.

The hour does not have to be filled correctly

Let us settle what governs this whole page. Nothing on it is being asked of you, there is no appeal at the bottom, and there is no routine in it anywhere.

You are looking at an invitation, and the One being tested inside it is God. Follow the verb in that famous sentence and it lands on Him. He is under examination. He is the one who offered to be found out. It is written, put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts (Malachi 3:10), and the Holy Spirit is what turns a famous sentence into an invitation addressed to you.

Here it is, in its own room:

Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.Malachi 3:10

Said to a nation, in one decade, about one building, where the store room had emptied and the families who worked there had gone home hungry. It is a sentence about people eating, and the voice it is spoken in is a father's, not a supervisor's: come and find out whether I am who you have decided I am. It is the Holy Spirit who does the carrying here, which is what separates a word being spoken over you from a phrase being repeated at you.

Now the routine, and it deserves fairness, because there is nothing wrong with any part of it and the person who gave it to you meant well.

A routine is safe. If the hour has a correct shape, then the hour is in your hands, and an hour that is in your hands is not an hour that is happening to you.

But the price is what you feel at twenty past five: if the hour has a correct shape, then a morning you did not manage it is a morning you got wrong, and now the review has a new item on it, and the new item is you.

You are dealing with a Father, and there is no shape to an hour that He requires of you. Jesus put it in ordinary family terms: which of you, if his son asks for a fish, will give him a serpent, or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion (Luke 11:11). No routine anywhere in that. A child says something and a Father is not that sort of person. It is the Holy Spirit, and not this page, who takes a line like that off a page and puts it in a bedroom at first light.

Now the review itself, which is the actual weather of the hour.

Your Father knows what you need before you ask Him, so the hour was never an examination you were sitting. It is written in Matthew 6:8, and He says it to people who had been taught that more words and better forms improved the odds. And then, in the same passage, He says do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself (Matthew 6:34), which is not a scolding of an anxious person. It is a description of how time actually works, handed to people who could not sleep either. His Spirit is the one who makes that a hand on the shoulder rather than an instruction you now have to obey.

And about the going over.

God has never once required you to solve the night before He would come near, and He is not waiting for the hour to be tidy. It is written that He gives to His beloved sleep (Psalm 127:2), and that verse sits at the end of a short passage about people rising early and going late to rest and eating the bread of anxious toil. Somebody wrote that down three thousand years ago after the same hour you are having. The Spirit is what makes that read as company rather than as advice.

Now where the trust goes, and it is one action rather than four parts.

Trust is not a technique and it has no steps, so nobody here is going to hand you a shape for your morning. What it has is somebody to hand something to. One real thing, out loud, and then the hour can be whatever it is.

Not money. Nothing on this site will ever ask you for that or route anything anywhere, including here. One real thing: the conversation from Tuesday, the form, the item that arrives at twenty past five.

You are owed nothing for trusting Him and that is exactly what makes it trust rather than a discipline. It is written that we have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, Abba, Father (Romans 8:15). Nobody says Abba as part of a routine with four parts that spell a word.

And one last thing, which is the whole reason this page is not going to give you a better system.

If you find this hard, you are not failing at it. Waking at ten to five is not a spiritual failure and it is not a character result. It is a thing your body is doing, and the eleven weeks were not wasted, and you do not owe anybody the twelfth.