New Every Morning, Including This One

There is a man who repairs stringed instruments, and he is at his bench most mornings before it is properly light.

I have watched him work. It is the most patient thing I know. He will spend forty minutes on a seam that nobody will ever see, using a hide glue he heats himself, and he will clamp it and leave it and come back tomorrow. He says a thing that is rushed comes apart in a year and a thing that is given its time comes apart in eighty. He talks about wood the way other people talk about weather, with a kind of respect that assumes it has opinions.

And every morning, at about the hour the window goes from gray to gold, he does something else, and this part he has never told anybody.

He adds one to a number.

The number is the count of mornings he has sat at that bench meaning to say something to God and not said it. He started it, more or less as a joke with himself, a long while ago. It is not a joke now. It has run into the hundreds, and somewhere around the second hundred it stopped being a record of what he had not done and became, quietly, the reason he could not do it.

Because a number like that develops a character. At eleven it is a bad habit. At four hundred it is an argument. Four hundred mornings is a case, and the case says: a man who has let four hundred mornings go is not a man who is serious, and a man who is not serious should not open his mouth about it on the four hundred and first.

So the count goes up, and the count is the barrier, and the barrier is made entirely of the count.

Meanwhile the light does what it does. It comes over the roofs opposite and lands on the bench, and the glue pot warms up, and the same wood he clamped yesterday has done what wood does overnight and is ready.

The morning did not arrive with a memory of yesterday's morning. Mornings do not accumulate. Only tallies do.

That is you at the bench.

You've been keeping a number. Perhaps not written down, but kept, and it has grown, and at some point it changed sides: it stopped being your description of the problem and became your evidence for staying in it. You are not held back by what you did. You're held back by your own arithmetic about how long you have not undone it.

The mercy is measured in mornings, not in merit

Lamentations is the darkest book in the library, and it is written by a man watching a city burn. Which is precisely why the sentence in the middle of it carries the weight it does. Nobody writes this from a comfortable chair.

It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22-23

Read the unit of measurement. New every morning. Not new every improvement. Not new every seventh attempt. The mercy is issued on a schedule tied to the rotation of the earth, and the earth does not consult your tally before it turns.

You are standing in a morning whose mercy was already made before you woke into it, and this is not my generosity: Lamentations 3:23 sets the schedule in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my reading of it who brings it into a room where a man has been counting.

Now, the Hebrew here rewards a second look, and I will keep it short. The word rendered compassions is rachamim, and it is plural in a way English cannot easily carry: not one compassion but a whole supply of them, and the verse says they do not run out. Then new every morning, chadashim labkarim, morning by morning, which is the language of something delivered rather than something earned. And then, at the end, the line lands not on the strength of the one receiving but on the character of the One sending: great is thy faithfulness. His faithfulness. Not yours. That is the whole architecture of the sentence, and your tally does not appear anywhere in it.

You have not been consumed, and the four hundred mornings were four hundred deliveries you did not open, which is written in the verse rather than being my consolation for you, with the Spirit of God able to make that land in a man who has been building a case against himself since the second hundred.

Consider what the tally has actually been doing. It has been treating mercy as a resource that depletes with use, so that the more mornings pass, the less of it there is for a man like you. The verse says the opposite in the plainest terms available: they do not fail, and they are new, and the newness is daily. A tally can only measure something that runs down. It has been measuring the wrong thing for four hundred days.

This morning is not the four hundred and first of anything. It is a morning, whole and new, and it is yours, because Lamentations 3:22 says the compassions do not fail, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that past an argument that has had years to get good.

There is one more thing in the passage and it is easy to miss. The man writing this has lost more than you or I have lost, and he is not describing a mood. He is stating a fact about God in a burning city. Which means this is not a verse for good weeks. It is a verse built for exactly the kind of morning you are having.