More Than They That Watch For Morning

Every book he has ever opened on this assumes he is asleep at three in the morning.

He is not asleep at three in the morning. He has not been asleep at three in the morning on a weeknight since 2011. He is on a floor with the lights on and the machines going and four other men who are also awake, and at three he takes his break in a room with a window that does not open.

So when the material says begin your day with Him, he does the translation in his head, the way he has learned to. When it says before the house is up, he thinks about his house, which is up, because his wife and his kids live on the other schedule and always will.

He is not resentful about the shift. It pays what it pays and it is why the house is theirs.

What has quietly happened over fourteen years is that he has come to think of himself as somebody doing an adapted version. A workaround. The one whose circumstances mean he gets a modified arrangement with God, which is fine, which he does not complain about, and which sits in him like a small permanent asterisk.

If your hours are the wrong ones too, come and sit down. Nothing here is going to ask you to be awake at a different time.

The psalm is written by somebody who was up

Here is a verse that gets read as poetry and was almost certainly written by somebody who knew exactly what the middle of the night looks like from the inside.

My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning.Psalm 130:6

They that watch for the morning. Those are night watchmen. Real ones, on real walls, doing a real job that somebody had to do while the city slept, and everybody reading that psalm in its own century knew exactly who was meant.

And the man writing does not compare himself to people in bed. He compares himself to the men who are awake. That is his reference point for what wanting God is like: the specific, physical, bone-level attention of somebody who has been up for hours and is watching the east.

Notice too that he says it twice. I say, more than they that watch for the morning. A man does not repeat a line like that unless he is inside the picture rather than looking at it from outside.

You are the one this psalm reaches for as its picture, and you were the illustration rather than the exception. Psalm 130:6 is where that sits, in a comparison built entirely out of people who are awake at night, and the same Spirit who let a watchman into the songbook is the one who takes an asterisk off a man on his break.

There is no correct hour and there never was one

Now let me deal with the actual source of the asterisk, because it is not Scripture and it should be named.

Almost everything written about this in the last hundred years was written by people who work days. That is not a conspiracy, it is a demographic fact, and it means the examples are all morning examples and the language is all morning language, and a man on nights reads himself as the adaptation.

But go looking for the rule and there is no rule. There is a psalm about the morning and there is another about the night watches. Jesus went out early once in Mark and spent a whole night praying in Luke. The Bible has no preferred hour, and the reason it has no preferred hour is that God is not on a schedule that anybody has to synchronize with.

Your three in the morning is not a substitute for somebody else's six. It is a time, and He is in it, at full strength, with nothing withheld because of what shift you drew.

You have the whole of God available in the hours you actually have, and you were never handed a reduced version. That sentence belongs to Psalm 139:12, where the night shines as the day and the darkness and the light are both alike to Him, and His Spirit does not thin out after midnight.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before another word, this outranks all of it.

Some people must not go without food, and this matters especially for somebody working nights. 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 will not be one here.

And a shift worker's body is already carrying something a day worker's is not. Nothing on this page is going to suggest you take one more thing off it. The time we are talking about is time, and you can free it without your body being involved at all.

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 basic sense in a house running two schedules. None of it fails anything.

You have been fully inside everything here, and you were never on the margin of it because of what your body needs. It is written into 2 Corinthians 8:12, where God receives according to what a person has, and the Holy Spirit carries that into a man in a break room with a window that does not open.

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.