One Name Before The Light

There is a chair. It is not a special chair and there is nothing on the arm of it, and he sits in it before the light comes up because that is when he wakes now, whether he wants to or not.

One name.

That is what he does. He says a name, and he holds it, in whatever way a man holds a name, and after a few minutes he is finished, and then he sits there for a while longer because getting up takes some organizing.

It used to be different and there is no point pretending it was not. There was a period of about fifteen years where two hours was normal and four was not unusual, and he had a list with sections in it, and he knew things about people's situations that he had never been told.

The change was gradual and then it was not. There was the illness, and then the recovery that was only ever partial, and there is a thing that has happened to his concentration that a specialist described in a sentence he has never repeated to anybody.

He can hold one name. Sometimes for a few minutes. Then it goes.

The sentence sits in the chair with him. Not I miss the old mornings. It is: this is what is left, and what is left is a decline, and everyone is too polite to say so.

You know that chair. It might be prayer, or reading, or thinking about anything for longer than a few minutes. Something in you that used to run long now runs short, and you have been reading the shortening as a graph that only goes one way.

The question in Zechariah, asked properly

There is a verse in Zechariah that is nearly always quoted as a piece of encouragement and is, in the text, a rebuke aimed at somebody specific.

For who hath despised the day of small things?Zechariah 4:10

It is a question, and it is not rhetorical in the soft way people use it. The people around that building project were disappointed by the size of what was being rebuilt. The older ones remembered the first temple and this one was not that, and they said so, and the question is put to them: who is it exactly that despises a small day?

Because it is not God. That is the force of the question. The verse goes on: they shall rejoice, and shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel. God is looking at the small thing with pleasure and asking who else in the room has a problem with it.

You are inside a day that God does not despise, and He has never once measured a morning against a previous one. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft framing chosen for a man in a chair before dawn, and the Holy Spirit who is with you in the few minutes you can hold is the evidence that the shortening was never a withdrawal.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic in that chair. If God does not despise a small day, then one name is information about an illness and a partial recovery and a specialist's sentence. It is not a record of decline, and it never had the standing to become that.

Who is doing the despising

Here is the second thing, and it is worth being direct about.

The question in Zechariah has an answer, and in your case the answer is not your family and it is not the people at church who are too polite. It is the man in the chair.

The one measuring this morning against a morning in 2009 is the man in the chair. Nobody else is running that comparison. Nobody else even has the data.

And that comparison is the heaviest thing you carry into that chair before the light, heavier than the illness, because the illness is simply a fact and the comparison is a verdict delivered daily by somebody with a grudge.

You have been carried through every one of the years since the recovery stopped improving, and the carrying did not shorten with the hours. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit at work through one held name rather than totting up minutes against a former self.

And nothing here promises the concentration comes back. Nobody on this page knows, and telling a man in your position that God will restore his old mornings is a promise nobody was authorized to make.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought in a dark room. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a man has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Spoken. Not held in a chair for years. And the thing in the way is not the illness and it is not the specialist. It is a sentence: what is left is a decline. Nobody has ever answered that out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a man with any authority before the light comes up. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in the two hours.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than loss, and there are mornings when you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.