The Day After Is My Hardest Day

Two people have asked you how the day went and nobody has ever asked about the morning.

That is not a complaint about them. Everybody knows the day is the thing. The day has a name and a date and a set of expectations, and it is reasonable for people to ask about it, and you say it was good, and it usually was.

The morning has no name at all.

And the morning is the one. It has been for about nine years. You get up at the ordinary time into a day that has nothing in it, in a house that is quieter than it was, with nothing to do and nobody arriving and nothing scheduled until whenever you go back.

And whatever the day itself gave you, it is gone by about nine.

Let me say two things before we go on, and I want both of them clearly.

The first is that this is real and it is common and hardly anybody says it, so most men who have it think they are the only one. The day is a structure and structures hold people up. The morning is the removal of the structure and there is nothing underneath it.

The second is this. If the morning has ever taken you somewhere past what one man can hold, that is not a thing to be carried alone. 988 is a crisis line in the United States and it is answered. A doctor, a counselor, or a pastor you trust is the right room for it. Nothing written here stands in for a qualified human being, and if the morning is that morning, that is where to go.

Lover and friend hast thou put far from me

There is a psalm that does something no other psalm does, and it matters that it is in there.

Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness. (Psalm 88:18, King James Version)

That is the last verse. The psalm ends there. There is no turn, no but, no nevertheless, no closing line about hope. It goes into the dark and it stops.

Every other psalm of that kind lifts somewhere near the end. This one does not, and it was kept, and it was sung, and it is in the book that people read aloud together.

Somebody decided that a psalm which ends in darkness needed to exist, because otherwise every person whose morning ends in darkness would conclude that there was no page for them.

You have a page in Scripture that does not lift at the end, and it is written into Psalm 88 that the last word is darkness and nothing follows it. The written word kept a prayer with no turn in it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a place to stand rather than a curiosity.

And notice who is being addressed even there. Hast thou put far from me.

You are speaking to somebody in the darkest sentence available, and Psalm 88:18 is addressed to God in the second person all the way to the end. Scripture keeps the whole complaint pointed at Him, and the Spirit of God is the one who is being spoken to at nine in the morning in a quiet house.

Why nobody has asked

Now let me be exact about the silence, because it is not indifference and knowing that helps.

Nobody asks about the morning because nobody has a concept of it. The day is an event. The morning after is not an event; it is an absence, and people do not ask about absences because there is nothing to name.

So the question never comes, and an unasked thing goes unsaid, and a thing that goes unsaid for nine years starts to look like a private oddity.

It is not. Ask any man who lives alone or nearly alone what the morning after is like and watch his face.

You have something in common with more men than you would guess, and a morning with no name has never once been a fault in the one living through it. Psalm 88 was kept whole so that a page would exist for exactly this, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in a quiet house at nine whether anybody has asked about it or not.

You were never the only one with a hard morning, and the written word kept a psalm with no lift in it so that somebody would have a page. Psalm 88:18 ends in the dark and was preserved anyway, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a thing that has no name and no question attached.

And here is the second thing, which is where the actual damage is.

Because the day is what people ask about, the answer is about the day, and the answer is honest, and it was good. So every conversation about this period of the year is true and complete and entirely misses the part that costs.

Nine years of accurate answers, and not one person knows.

You have been answering the question that was asked rather than the one that mattered, and Scripture puts the whole of a man's darkest account into the record without editing it. Psalm 88 keeps every line, and the Spirit of God is the one who receives the part nobody has asked about.

Say which day it is

So here is the assignment, and it is one sentence and it is about a different day.

Tell one person that the morning after is the hard one, not the day.

One person. Anybody who will not immediately try to fix it, which usually means somebody who is not going to be in your house at any point.

Twelve words. The day is fine. It is the morning after that gets me.

You are able to correct which day is being discussed, and it has never once required anybody to do anything about it. Psalm 88 was kept in full rather than edited into something more useful, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man saying twelve words about a morning nobody has ever asked about.

And I want to say why this is worth doing when it changes nothing practical.

At the moment, there is a fact about your year that no other human being holds. Not because it is a secret. Because it has never been asked and never been offered. That means the hardest part of your year exists entirely inside one man, which is a heavier arrangement than it needs to be.

Said once, to one person, it exists in two places. That is the whole difference and it is a considerable one.

And there is a chance, not a certainty, that the person you tell will remember, and that at some point in a future year the phone will go at about ten in the morning for no stated reason.

You are putting a fact about your year somewhere outside yourself, and the written word preserved a psalm that ends in darkness rather than tidying it. Psalm 88:18 stops where it stops, and the Spirit of God is the one who is in the house at nine whether anybody has asked or not.