The Alarm You Turn Off At Five

Three hundred and sixty one days. He worked it out once and then wished he had not.

The alarm is set for five. It has been set for five since a Sunday last August when a man he respects said, from a stage, that he had never met a spiritually serious person who did not get up early.

He bought a lamp for it. He put the Bible on the kitchen table the night before, open, so it would be waiting. He told his wife, who said that sounded good and did not ask about it again, which was a mercy.

Day one he got up. Day two he got up. Day three he got up and fell asleep sitting at the table with his hand on the page, and woke at ten past six with a crease across his face.

Day four he turned it off.

And that is where it has stayed, three hundred and sixty one days, the same small act at the same hour: a hand out from under the blanket in the dark, a thumb, and then another two hours of sleep with a low hum of failure underneath it.

He gets up at ten to seven. He has always got up at ten to seven. He is not a lazy man; he is on a site by half seven and he does not sit down until four.

Here is what that alarm has done. It has not produced one morning of prayer in a year. What it has produced is three hundred and sixty one small daily notifications that he is not a spiritually serious person, delivered in the dark, before he is even properly awake.

That is the thing I want to take off him. Not the desire. The notification.

The verse names a direction, not a clock

There is a line in the fifth psalm that has been used to sell early rising for a very long time. Look at what it says and, more importantly, what it does not.

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

Take that where you are lying in the dark. You are as welcome at ten to seven as any man is at five. The word says in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee, and it never named an hour, and it is the Holy Spirit who receives what is aimed at Him.

In the morning. Not at five. Not before dawn. Not before anybody else in the house is awake.

And read the second half, because that is where the actual instruction is. I will direct my prayer unto thee, and will look up. Direct is an aiming word. Look up is a posture. The psalm is about which way a man turns when the day starts, and it says nothing whatsoever about what the clock says when he turns.

Somebody added the hour. It was not God, and it was not the psalmist.

So take this where you are lying, and know it is not me being soft with you, it is what is written: you are not less serious at ten to seven than any man is at five. His word says in the morning I will direct my prayer, and it is the Holy Spirit who receives a sentence at ten to seven exactly as He receives one before dawn.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who got up at four for fifty years, and who is quoted constantly by people making this exact point from a stage. Here is what those people leave out.

He also built practices for coal miners.

Men who came off a night shift at six in the morning. Women in service who worked fourteen hours and were not permitted a candle. He did not hand those people his own four o'clock and tell them to become serious. He built small groups that met at whatever hour their work allowed, short readings, a handful of plain questions asked out loud. The whole apparatus was designed around the actual lives of people who did not own their own time.

His four o'clock was his. It was never the standard, and he did not preach it as one.

The name that got attached to those people started as mockery of how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the method survived because it was built to fit a real week.