Sixty One Years of Mornings

The trouble is not the night. She sleeps, mostly, and when she does not sleep she reads.

The trouble is between about ten past six and twenty past.

Sixty one years, she woke up and said something. Not anything important. Whether the frost had got the beans. What that noise was in the night. Whether he wanted the small egg or the big one. Sixty one years of a sentence going out of her mouth in the first minute of the day and landing somewhere.

Now it goes out and does not land, and she hears it not land, and that is the ten minutes.

She has a routine for the rest of it. She is not helpless and she would be irritated by anybody who thought she was. She has the church on Sundays and the two afternoons at the charity shop and her granddaughter every other week, and she is perfectly capable of a full and useful day. It is just that the day has an entrance, and the entrance is a hallway with the light off, and she goes through it alone every morning at ten past six.

Her daughter says, gently, that it will get easier. She does not argue with her daughter. She has buried a mother and a brother and two friends and she knows exactly what will and will not get easier, and she has decided not to spend the little breath she has correcting a kind young woman of fifty eight.

What she would actually like is for somebody to say something true about the ten minutes. Not about next year.

Sit down at the table. The kettle can wait.

God did not treat it as a small thing either

Here is a verse that most people find odd until they have needed it.

Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints.Psalm 116:15

Precious is not the same as pleasant. The word carries weight and cost, the way a jeweler uses it. It means valued, not enjoyed. God is not saying He was glad about it. He is saying it was not cheap to Him, and that it did not pass unnoticed.

That matters at ten past six because the loneliness of the morning carries a lie inside it. The lie says the world went on and nobody registered it. The neighbors moved their car. The post came. The kettle boiled the same way it boils for everybody.

Heaven registered it. You are grieving something God Himself counted as costly, and Psalm 116:15 is where it stands written, and the Spirit did not put that line into the book to be read at a distance by comfortable people.

The psalm around it is worth knowing too. It is a psalm about being personally rescued, written by somebody who says he was brought low and helped. That verse is not a detached remark about mortality from a throne room. It sits in the middle of somebody's own testimony about being in trouble.

And a few lines earlier the same writer says he will walk before the Lord in the land of the living, which is an odd thing to set beside a verse about dying unless the two belong together. They do. The God who counts the death of His people as costly is the same God who walks with the ones still here, and He does both without changing His expression, and the Spirit who inspired that psalm put the two sentences within a few lines of each other on purpose.

The sentence that does not land

Now the ten minutes, specifically, because that is the actual place and everything else is scenery.

What you lost at ten past six is not company in general. It is a particular structure. For sixty one years the first thing that happened in your day was that you spoke and were heard, and being heard first thing is one of the ways a human being knows where they are.

That is not sentimentality. That is design. God made people to be addressed and to answer, and He said it was not good for a person to be alone before anything at all had gone wrong in the world.

So the ache in the hallway is not you failing to adjust. It is a real thing missing, correctly reported.

And there is one true thing about it that is worth more than a hundred reassurances about next year. You are heard at ten past six. Not by him. By God, who is described all through Scripture as the one who hears, and the Spirit who is in you is not on a schedule that begins later in the morning.

Say it out loud, then. That is not a technique and it is not pretending he is there. It is speaking to Somebody who is. Whether the frost got the beans is an entirely acceptable thing to say to God, and there is nothing in the written word that requires a widow to compose herself before she opens her mouth in the morning.

There is a reason that is not silly. All through Scripture people speak to God about small things, out loud, in ordinary rooms, and not one of those prayers is reported as beneath Him. Hannah prayed with no sound coming out at all and was heard. A father on a road said help my unbelief and was answered on the spot. Nothing written anywhere suggests God prefers a well made sentence at ten past six to whatever you actually have, and the Spirit is described as the one who helps in exactly the place where the words run out.

What she was not told

Here is the thing your daughter meant kindly and got slightly wrong.

It does not exactly get easier. It gets different. The sharpness goes out of some of it and other parts arrive that nobody warned you about, and after a while the missing becomes something you carry rather than something that happens to you.

But the ten minutes may well stay. Some people keep a version of it for the rest of their lives, and there is nothing wrong with them.

You are not required to be further along than you are. Nothing written anywhere puts a term on this, and the Comforter has never once been impatient with a woman in a dark hallway.

What changes, more than the ache, is the company in it. That is the honest offer and it is not a small one.