The Mornings Are Empty

They did it at the kitchen table for thirty four years, at ten past six, and the arrangement was that she read and he prayed, because she read better and he prayed shorter.

She died on a Thursday in November.

At the funeral, at the end, when the last of them had gone and he was standing in the church car lot with the keys in his hand, he told God he would keep the mornings. He said it out loud into the cold. He said: I will keep our mornings.

And he did, for about five months, and it was the worst five months of his life, and nobody knew because he did not say.

Because here is what happens. He gets up at ten past six. He sits in his chair. Her chair is there. He reads, because now he has to do both parts, and he reads badly and out loud because otherwise the words do not go in. And then he prays, and it is the shortest thing you have ever heard, and it goes nowhere, and he knows it goes nowhere, and then he sits there for a while and then he gets up and makes the porridge.

Nothing. Not grief, even. Grief he could work with. Nothing at all, like reading a manual out loud to a wall.

He stopped in April. And he has not started again, and it has been three years, and he thinks about ten past six every single morning at about ten past six.

You may be talking to a wall. And you may have concluded, reasonably, that a man ought to stop doing a thing that produces nothing, and that continuing would be a kind of self deception unbecoming in a grown adult.

A man who wrote down the inventory

Now let me take you to the end of a small book by a prophet who spends the whole thing complaining, and I mean that respectfully, because he does, and God does not rebuke him for it.

At the very end, Habakkuk does something that has kept a great many people upright. He writes an inventory of everything that has failed. And it is not a spiritual inventory. It is a farm.

Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation.Habakkuk 3:17-18

You are able to do a thing on purpose in an empty room, and Scripture makes that the high point of the book. Habakkuk 3:18 puts a deliberate verb after six clauses of failure, and the Holy Spirit is the one who sat at that table through five months of nothing.

Count the losses first

Six clauses of failure before he gets to the word yet.

No blossom. No fruit. The olive fails. The fields yield nothing. The flock gone. The stalls empty. That is a man listing everything that would ordinarily produce a feeling in him, and stating that none of it is producing anything, because none of it is there.

And then: yet I will rejoice.

Now here is the thing I want you to see, and it is the whole reason I brought you here. That is not a description of his mood. A man standing in an empty stall is not experiencing joy about the stall. It is a decision expressed as a verb, and the grammar of it is deliberate: I will, which in that construction is not a prediction about the future but a statement of intent.

He is doing it. Not feeling it. Doing it, in an empty barn, on purpose.

You are able to do a thing on purpose in an empty room, and Scripture puts that in the record as the high point of the book. Habakkuk 3:18 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it off a farm in the ancient world and puts it at a kitchen table at ten past six.

Now let me speak to the self deception, because it is your word and it is a serious one.

Self deception is telling yourself something is happening when it is not. You have not done that once. You know precisely that nothing is happening and you have never pretended otherwise, not to yourself and not to anybody in that church.

What you have done is a different thing entirely, and it has a different name. You showed up at a table for five months and did something that gave you nothing at all, in an empty room, with her chair there. That is not deception. There is not a word for it in ordinary speech, but Habakkuk had one, and the word is yet.

You have been doing the thing the prophet did and calling it a lie. Scripture keeps a decision made in an empty barn as the climax of the book, and the Spirit of God is the one who sat at that table with a man reading badly out loud for five months.

What the flatness is not

And let me be careful, because there is a rule here and it exists to protect you.

I am not telling you the mornings fill up again. I do not know that. I am not going to schedule the return of anything for you, because a man who has been given a date is a man waiting, and you have waited enough at ten past six.

What I will say is what the flatness is not. It is not evidence that nobody is listening. It is not a verdict on thirty four years. And it is not, however it feels, a report on whether you are heard, because being heard was never something a person could detect from the inside.

You are heard at this temperature, and the temperature was never the transmission. Scripture says it in so many words, and that is the plain sense of a man rejoicing in an empty stall by decision, and His Spirit is the one carrying words out of a kitchen where nothing whatever is happening.