Direct It, And Look Up

He got what he asked for, and that turned out to be the problem.

He had wanted this for a long time. He had said for two years that what he needed was time, that if he could only get a stretch of it he would use it properly, and this month, for reasons that involve a shift change and a child getting older, he got it.

So on the first morning he sat down at the table with the house asleep and the light not up yet, and he said good morning to God, and then he sat there.

He got through the people he prays for in about four minutes. He said thank you for a few things and meant all of them. He read a bit, and it was fine, and he could not have told you afterward what it was about. And then he looked at the clock and there was a great deal of time left and he did not know what to do with any of it.

Second morning he did the same and it was shorter. Third morning he took his phone in with him, which he had promised himself he would not do, and he has taken it in every morning since.

The thing he cannot say to anybody is that he asked God for two years for this and he does not know how to be in it.

If you are in that particular silence, come and sit down. It is not a test and you are not failing it.

Two verbs, and the second one is the whole answer

David has this same morning, and he writes down what he does in it, and it is eleven words long and almost nobody teaches the second half.

My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O LORD; in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee, and will look up.Psalm 5:3

Direct my prayer unto thee, and will look up.

Two things. He aims something at God, and then he looks up.

The first one is what everybody teaches. Aim it. Say it. Direct it, which in the Hebrew has the sense of setting something out deliberately, the way you lay out the pieces of a thing in order before you begin. That is the four minutes. That is the people he prays for and the thank you. He is doing that part and doing it honestly.

It is the second verb he has never been given. And will look up. The word carries the sense of watching, of keeping your eyes on the road, of a man on a wall who has sent word out and is now watching to see what comes back.

That is not doing nothing. That is the second half of the activity, and it takes longer than the first half, and nobody told him it existed.

You have not been failing at prayer, and you were only ever handed the first half of it. Psalm 5:3 is where that sits, in two verbs joined by an and that most of us read straight past, and the same Spirit who moved David to write both of them is the one who lets a tired man stop grading his own mornings.

What looking up actually looks like on a Tuesday

Let me make that concrete, because the danger with a sentence like the one above is that it turns into a technique by Thursday and a burden by the following month.

Looking up is not a posture and it is not a feeling you have to generate. It is closer to attention with nothing scheduled in it. You have said the thing. Now you stay, and you keep your eyes on Him rather than on the clock, and you let whatever is going to happen happen, including nothing.

Some mornings something comes. A sentence lands that you did not compose. A name arrives. Something you read three weeks ago finally opens.

And a great many mornings nothing comes, and the psalm does not treat that as a failed morning, and neither should you. A man watching from a wall who sees nothing has still done his job, and the job was the watching.

The phone is not a moral failure either, by the way. The phone is what a person reaches for when they have been left in a room with no instructions. Now you have got instructions and they are eleven words long.

You are already equipped for the second half, and you have been since He came to live in you. That sentence belongs to Romans 8:26, where the Spirit Himself carries what we cannot put into words, and His Spirit is not standing outside the door during the part where you go quiet.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, the part that outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is never going to be one here.

And everything above works the same for a man eating three meals a day. The time is any time you can free, however you free it, and this article would say the identical thing to somebody who freed it by changing a shift.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your wife is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is ordinary courtesy. None of it fails anything.

You are not one step behind anybody because of what your body will not permit. Scripture settled that long before you got here (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Spirit of God has never once been issued according to what somebody is medically cleared to do.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.