Eleven Years Of Failing At Five In The Morning

She has set the alarm for five since she was twenty three.

Not every night. But whenever things get serious, whenever she really needs God to move, that is what she reaches for, because that is what she was taught: the heavens open over people who meet Him before the day starts. The great ones prayed at five. That was the pattern, and it was given to her by people who loved her and believed it themselves.

Eleven years. She has managed it, she reckons, about forty times.

And here is what she has never told anybody: the forty times were the worst of it. Because on those mornings she sat there at ten past five, awake, cold, having done the thing, and nothing happened, and she could not work out whether she had missed some further step or whether she had done it wrong or whether it had counted at all.

So now the alarm goes off and she turns it off and she lies there for a second in a very specific kind of failure, which is the failure of somebody who thinks the door is right there and she is the only reason it will not open.

If you were handed a condition like that, come and sit down at this table. Nothing about the people who gave it to you is going to be mocked here, and neither are you.

The people who told you loved you

Let us start with them, because you cannot hear anything until you know I am not going to make you feel stupid.

The people who handed you five in the morning were not con artists. They were people who had met God early and wanted you to have what they had, and the only way they knew to describe it was to describe the circumstances they were in when it happened. That is a very human mistake and it is made lovingly all the time.

Their morning was real. Their conclusion about the mechanism was the part that slipped.

You are not on the outside of anything because of a clock. Nothing about your sleep has ever decided how God is disposed toward you. I am not softening this to be kind. The written word says God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8), which puts the whole opening on His side and dates it to before we had done anything at all, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not the sentence, who makes it live in a woman lying in the dark at five past five.

What the sky opening actually looks like in Scripture

Here is what changed this for me, and it is not a better technique for the morning.

Go and look at the times heaven opens in the Bible and ask, every time, who did it.

And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him.Matthew 3:16

Nobody in that account earned it. Jacob was asleep on a stone, running away from the consequences of something he had done, when the ladder appeared over him and he woke and said the Lord was in this place and he had not known it. The sky over the flood, the sky over the besieged city, the sky over the Son. Every single one of them opens from the far side, and not one of them was triggered by the person underneath.

You are not the one being waited on. The opening is God's, it has always been God's, and there is nothing in your hand that He has been waiting for you to use. That is not my reading of it. It is the plain shape of every one of those accounts as they are written, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes it register in a woman who has spent eleven years thinking she was holding a key.

A different picture of what the morning is for

Now, something has to go in the place we just emptied, or you will simply find a subtler condition to worry about by Thursday.

So here it is. There is nothing wrong with five in the morning. It is a lovely hour and quiet and some people love God best in it. What is wrong is only the idea that it is a lever.

You are welcome to God at five and at nine and at midnight, on the same terms in every one of them, which are His terms and not the clock's. Scripture says come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need (Hebrews 4:16), and the boldness there is grounded in what Christ has done and never in what hour it is, and the Holy Spirit, not the wording, is the one who carries a person in at any hour without checking the time on the way past.

And if the eleven years of failing has cost more than anybody around you knows, if sleep has gone, if the mornings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.