Bracing for Tomorrow

The lamp is on, the curtains are still open, and he has not been in this room since about six.

It is a good room. That is what makes it strange. His daughter is halfway through a long story about somebody at school, and the story has a hole in the middle of it that she has not noticed yet, and her mother has noticed and is waiting, delighted, for her to walk into it. Somebody's mug has gone cold on the arm of a chair. The window is going blue at the edges. There is laughing.

And he is not here. He is at nine forty tomorrow morning, in a room he has never been in, having a conversation that has not happened, watching a face that has not made an expression yet.

He has been there since six. He was there through dinner, answering in the right places. He is there now, physically on the sofa with his elbows on his knees, and if you asked him he would tell you he is listening, and he half is. Every so often the room pulls him back for a few seconds and then the elastic takes him again, straight back into tomorrow, and he runs the whole thing once more from the top, and he braces.

He could not tell you what he is bracing for exactly. Nothing catastrophic. Just the shape of the day: the meeting, the call after it, the thing he has to say to somebody, the drive. He is rehearsing it the way you would rehearse a speech, except there is no speech, and every run through adds nothing at all, and he does it again anyway.

Then his daughter says his name twice and he says sorry, what, and the room laughs at him, warmly, and his wife says he was miles away, and he laughs too and says he was, and puts his hand up like a man admitting a small crime.

It is a small crime. That is not what is sitting in his chest.

What is sitting in his chest is that later he will lie in bed having spent an entire evening on a day that has not arrived yet, and the day that had actually been given to him, the lamp and the story and the hole in the middle of it, went past him without being tasted, exactly the way last night did, and the night before that.

Maybe that is your evening. Maybe you have been in tomorrow since you got in the door, and the room you are actually sitting in has been going on around you like something on in the background, and you have not eaten anything tonight either.

The mercy is issued daily

I want to say the true thing first, because most people at this point have been told to be more present, and being told to be present is like being told to be taller.

You are not bracing because you are undisciplined. You are bracing because bracing feels like preparation, and preparation feels like safety, and somewhere in you there is a sincere conviction that if you go through tomorrow enough times tonight you will arrive at it already carrying what it takes. That is not a character flaw. It is an attempt to be strong, and the reason it is not working is not that you are doing it badly.

It is that the thing you are reaching for has not been handed out yet.

It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22-23

New every morning. Not stockpiled. Not issued in advance for a person organized enough to collect early. The mercy that will meet you at nine forty tomorrow is real, and it is certain, and it does not exist yet in a form you can hold tonight, which is exactly why every rehearsal comes back empty. You have been trying all evening to feel a grace that is dated for the morning.

You are carrying tonight's portion and not tomorrow's, and the emptiness you have been feeling since six is not a failure of nerve. Lamentations 3:23 says the mercies are new every morning and calls that faithfulness, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line from a book of laments and sets it down in a bright living room with the curtains still open.

The people in the wilderness learned this with bread. It came every day and it did not keep; the portion someone hid for tomorrow was spoiled by morning, and God did not scold them for being hungry. He simply kept the delivery daily, on purpose, so nobody would ever have to live on what they had managed to store.

You have been given a daily God and not a warehouse, and there is nothing wrong with you for finding tomorrow's shelf empty tonight. It is written that His compassions do not fail and are new every morning, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes daily feel like faithfulness rather than like scarcity.

Tonight has a portion of its own

Now the second thing, and it is the one that gives you back the room.

If tomorrow's mercy is dated for tomorrow, then something follows that almost nobody says: tonight has one too. Tonight is not the empty stretch between two real days. It is a day, and it came with its own ration, and yours is sitting in the room you have not been inside since six.

Listen to how Jesus divides it up.

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.Matthew 6:34

Sufficient unto the day. He is not handing out a technique and He is not telling you to relax, which nobody has ever managed on instruction. He is saying that the days are portioned, that each one carries what belongs to it, and that tomorrow is already staffed. It has a mercy assigned to it, and the mercy is not you, and it never was.

You are inside a day that has its own supply, and the lamp and the story and the cold mug are what is on the table tonight. Matthew 6:34 says each day is sufficient to itself and Lamentations says the compassions are new every morning, and the Holy Spirit is the one who hands a person back an evening they had already written off.

And I want to be careful here, because this is exactly where a page like this usually goes wrong. Nothing I am saying is a practice. Do not make tonight into a discipline, do not start a habit, and please do not go to bed measuring how well you did at being present. If you go back into that room and manage four minutes before the elastic takes you again, four minutes is not a poor score. There is no score. This is a meal, not an exercise.

You were handed an evening tonight, and it is yours whether it lasts four minutes or the whole of it. It is written that His mercies are new every morning, which means the next one is already covered and does not need you tonight, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets a man off the edge of the sofa and back into the middle of his own house.