The Morning She Could Not Get Up

Seven oh four, and the curtains are open because she never closed them. The light comes in soft and low and lies along the top of the quilt in a long pale stripe. Outside, a car door. Somebody's sprinkler. A bird being extremely pleased with itself in the gutter.

She is awake. She has been awake since ten to seven.

The list runs by itself, the way it does. The forms that go back today. The thing at eleven that she is chairing. The call she promised on Sunday and has not made. The dish in the sink from last night, which she can see in her mind exactly, at the angle she left it.

She tells her body to get up.

Nothing happens.

Not a refusal. She is not lying there arguing with herself or negotiating for five more minutes. The instruction goes out perfectly clearly and nothing at the other end of it moves, the way a light switch goes down in a room where the bulb has gone. There is no drama in it at all, which is the frightening part.

She lies still and looks at the ceiling, where there is a hairline crack she has been meaning to get somebody to look at since March.

And then, because this is what she does, she begins the arithmetic. If this is what today is. If she is the sort of person this happens to now. What it says about the last four years that she is flat on her back at seven oh four on an ordinary Thursday while everybody else in the world appears to have got up without any difficulty whatsoever.

Everyone she knows would say she is the strong one. That is not vanity; it is simply the job she has been doing. She is the one who organizes. She is who they call. She has held a great deal together for a long time, quietly and well, and nobody has ever once asked her how she is doing it, because she has never given anybody a reason to.

The stripe of light moves an inch along the quilt.

You know this morning, and you know the arithmetic that runs in it. That is the part nobody sees, and it is worse than the tiredness. You are lying there working out what this proves, filing yourself under a new heading, and somewhere in it is the small, cold question of whether the person everybody counts on has just quietly stopped existing.

The Word For What You Are This Morning Is Not Failure

You are not the strong one today, and you are still entirely His. Psalm 116:6 was written by somebody flat out, and the Spirit has no interest in waiting for you to stand up before it applies.

The LORD preserveth the simple: I was brought low, and he helped me.Psalm 116:6

Look at who gets preserved in that line. Not the capable. Not the organized. The simple, which different translations render as the unwary, the childlike, the defenseless, the ones with nothing clever about them. The word is not an insult and it was never meant as one. It describes a person with no strategy left, and Scripture puts the Lord's preserving right on top of exactly that person.

Then the psalmist says the second thing, and it is six words, and they are the whole psalm. I was brought low, and he helped me.

Not: I was brought low, and I got up. Not: I was brought low, and I found something inside me. Being low is simply where the help arrived. It is stated as location, not as fault, and the psalmist does not appear even slightly embarrassed about it.

You have been described in Scripture, not diagnosed by it. The Spirit knew this morning was coming a long time before you did, and it is written into Psalm 116:6 in six words: I was brought low, and he helped me.

Nobody Is Billing You For This

Here is the thing I most want you to hear, and I want to say it before anything else gets said, because the whole rest of this stands on it.

This is not rest so that you can go again.

The mercy on you today is not an investment in next week's output. God is not topping you up so the calls get returned and the eleven o'clock gets chaired. If somebody hands you rest and mentions in the same breath what they hope you will do with it afterward, that is not rest, that is maintenance, and you have had quite enough maintenance. What is being extended to you this morning is mercy, toward you, full stop, with no clause on the end of it.

You are being held for your own sake this morning, and for nothing else. That is Scripture, not a kindness I am inventing, and His Spirit is what makes it move.

Nobody is running a tally on you. There is no ledger where today goes in the debit column and has to be worked off later. The strong one has not been demoted and the useful one is not being reassessed, because you were never being kept for your usefulness in the first place, and if you were, the whole gospel would be a payroll.

You have been received exactly as you are, flat on your back, at seven oh four. You are not taking my word for it. His word puts the preserving on the simple and the helping on the brought-low, and the Spirit is what carries that off a page and into a bedroom with the curtains still open.

One plain thing, because it belongs here. If this morning is not one morning, if it keeps arriving, if the flatness has been going on for weeks, then a doctor is a good and merciful thing and there is no shame anywhere near it. Getting help is not a failure of faith and it never was. And if what you are carrying feels like danger to your own life, tell a person today, tonight, out loud, and call a crisis line where you are, because staying alone with that is not what any of this means.