New Every Morning, Including This One

Frost on the porch rail and the sun not properly up, so everything out past the fence is still the color of nothing much.

Two of them out there with coffee. The third one comes at about a quarter past if he comes.

He is seventy-one.

Here is the shape of his day, and it has been this shape for four years. The first hour is the worst hour. Not metaphorically. Between about six and seven his body is at its most difficult and his mind is at its lowest and everything that is true about his situation is true at maximum volume, and then, at some point in the second hour, the whole thing thins out and becomes manageable and stays manageable for the rest of the day.

He is not a complainer and he does not describe it to anybody, and the men who come at six know only that he is quiet until he is not.

And he has been in church for fifty years and he has heard the verse about a thousand times.

His mercies are new every morning.

He has never once applied it to that hour. Not deliberately. It simply never occurred to him that the verse had a time on it and that the time was the exact hour he dreads, because he had always heard it as a general encouragement about God being good, which is what most people hear.

If your worst hour has a time on it, you know exactly which one it is, and you know you have never thought of that hour as a place a promise is aimed at.

The verse has a time stamped on it

The weight first and whole, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it never gets shortened.

What this costs is not the day, which is manageable after about seven. It is the hour. It costs you the first sixty minutes of every day for four years, which adds up to something nobody has ever calculated on your behalf. It costs the waking, which for most people is neutral and for you is a specific event you brace for. It costs the men at six, in the sense that they have a version of you that starts an hour late. And it costs you the fact that you have never once described it, which means nothing in your life has ever been arranged around a thing that is true of one twenty-fourth of every day you live.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your four years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before we go on: if that first hour has taken you somewhere darker, and the first hour is exactly where that happens to people, tell one living person today. Your doctor, one of the two on the porch, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks no man to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who turn up at six with two cups.

Now, Lamentations, and read where the sentence sits.

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

New every morning.

That is a time. Not a general disposition, not a description of God's character in the abstract. The writer puts a specific hour on it, and the hour he picks is the one at the beginning.

And consider where he is when he writes it. This is a man sitting in the ruins of a city that has been destroyed, in a book that is almost entirely a description of the worst thing that ever happened to his people. He is not writing from a good week. He is writing from rubble, and in the middle of it he says that there is something that arrives in the morning.

You are being handed a promise with a time on it, and the time is the hour you brace for. Lamentations 3:23 dates the mercies to the morning specifically, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line written in rubble and lays it on a frosted porch rail.

Now the verb, because it is not what people assume. New. Not renewed, not restored, not topped up. New, which means the supply arriving at six tomorrow is not left over from today and was not stockpiled by anything you did or failed to do yesterday.

You have something arriving that has no connection to how yesterday went. That is written into Lamentations 3:23, and His Spirit in you is the one who makes a daily arrival into a fact about six in the morning rather than a sentiment about God in general.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because fifty years of good preaching has already been done on this verse.

It does not say the mornings are getting easier. It makes no promise about your body between six and seven tomorrow, and I am not going to make one, because what God does there is His, in His own way, and I am not going to hand a man a prediction about the exact hour he dreads.

And it does not say the mercies are a compensation for the hour, or a reason to be glad about it. This site does not do that. Nothing here suggests the difficult hour is good for you or that the arrival is a fair trade for it. The writer is in rubble. He does not tell anybody the rubble was worth it.

You were never told the morning is easy; you were told what arrives in it. Scripture stamps a time on the mercies, and the same Spirit who inspired it is the one who carries that onto a cold porch before the sun is properly up.