The Morning After the Night It Meant

At midnight it was true and at seven in the morning he cannot find it.

Let me be precise about what he is looking for, because the imprecision is doing him harm. He is not looking for the fact. He knows the fact. What he is looking for is the quality that the fact had at midnight: the weight of it, the way the room felt, the sense that something had been settled at a level below argument.

At seven in the morning the same fact is sitting there like a piece of furniture. Correct, unremarkable, and completely flat.

And so he spends the first hour of the day trying to get back to midnight.

He goes over what he said. He tries to reconstruct the conditions. He wonders whether he should have written it down while it was still warm, and he has done that before, and the writing down never preserves the temperature either; it preserves the sentences and lets the temperature go.

That is the loop, and he is in it most mornings after a night like that.

Now, what nobody has ever said to him is that the two are not supposed to match, and that Scripture has a settled expectation about how night and morning relate to each other.

That is you at seven.

You have a fact from last night and a morning that will not hold it at the same temperature, and you have decided that the gap between them is a contradiction to be resolved rather than an ordinary feature of being a person with a body.

The psalm puts night and morning in an order

David writes half a line about weeping and half about joy, and the structure of the sentence is what I want rather than the sentiment.

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

Look at what the psalm is actually doing with time.

It puts a night and a morning side by side and it does not pretend the night was unreal. Weeping may endure for a night, which is a genuine night, of genuine length, and nobody in this psalm is told that they should not have felt what they felt in the dark.

And then a morning arrives that is different in character from the night, and the psalm treats that difference as normal rather than as a problem.

You are living in a scriptural pattern rather than a personal failure, and night and morning are named as different in the same sentence, and I am not making the psalm say more than it does: Psalm 30:5 sets them side by side in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can bring it to a man at a desk at seven.

Now, I want to be careful with this verse because it is often used badly. It is not a promise about how your Tuesday will feel and it is not a guarantee attached to a timetable. What it is, is a statement that God has arranged human experience in stretches with different weathers in them, and that the change of weather from one stretch to the next is His doing and not a fault in you.

Which means the flatness of your seven o'clock is not evidence about your midnight. It is a morning, and mornings have their own character, and the psalm assumes that.

You have a night that was real and a morning that is ordinary, and the psalm holds both without treating either as a report on the other, which is written into the structure rather than into my sympathy for a man in a loop, with the Spirit of God able to settle it where an hour of reconstruction has only tired him out.

There is one more thing worth having, and it is in the first half of the verse. In his favor is life. Favor, there, is a settled disposition rather than a passing mood. It does not fluctuate with the hour, which is precisely the property your midnight had and your seven o'clock does not, and the psalm locates that property in Him rather than requiring it of you.

This holds at seven exactly as it held at midnight, because the settled part was never yours to maintain, because Scripture puts the favor and the life together, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a study at first light.