Thirty-One Years And He Has Not Missed A Morning

He worked it out in a lay-by, which is where he works most things out.

Thirty-one years. Not perfectly, and he is not the sort of man who would claim that, but essentially unbroken, in cabs and kitchens and once in a hospital corridor and about four hundred times in that specific lay-by on the westbound side.

He has never made anything of it. Nobody knows.

And he was sitting there about three weeks ago with the cup on the dash and the sun coming up over the stubble, and a question arrived out of nowhere, in the flat way that real questions do.

When did I last think about Him while I was doing this.

He could not answer it.

He could tell you what he had read that morning. He could tell you where he was in the book, and what he had prayed for, which is a list of about eleven people he has carried for years and prays for by name and means every one of them.

And he could not remember the last morning in which the Person had actually been in the cab with him, as somebody there, rather than as the reason the whole arrangement exists.

Not a dry patch. That is what confused him. He has had dry patches and he knows what they feel like and this is not one.

Everything is running. Nothing has stopped. The whole thing is in good order and it is being done faithfully by a man who has not missed a morning in thirty-one years, and somewhere inside it the Person has gone quiet, and he cannot date it.

That is what has been sitting on him for three weeks in that lay-by.

And you have a practice that is running perfectly. Nothing has broken and nothing has stopped, and somewhere in the middle of it you have lost track of the One it was always about.

He named the work first, and He named it in detail

There is a letter in Revelation to a church that had this exact condition, and almost everybody quotes the second half of it and skips the first, which reverses the whole thing.

Here is what He says before anything else.

I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance, and how you cannot bear with those who are evil.Revelation 2:2

Works. Toil. Patient endurance.

That is not a polite preamble. He goes through it item by item, in detail, and He is specific about what they have done and how hard it has been, and the words He picks are about effort sustained over a long time.

Only after that does He say what is missing.

You are seen in detail by Somebody who names the thirty-one years before He says anything else. It is written, I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance (Revelation 2:2), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a commendation like that land in a lay-by on a man who has never told anybody about the mornings.

Now the thing that has been sitting on you, and let us be careful with it.

Nobody on this page is going to tell you the habit was the problem. It was not. Thirty-one years of turning up is the reason there is anything here to notice, and a man who had drifted off the practice altogether would not have had a lay-by moment at all, because there would have been nothing running to notice a silence inside.

The practice is what kept the room in good order. What has happened is that you have been in a well kept room and have stopped looking up.

You are not being asked to change anything you do, only to look up while you do it. Scripture says one thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord (Psalm 27:4), and the word is gaze, which is a thing done with the eyes and not with the hands, and it is the Holy Spirit who turns a man's face.

And the fact that you cannot date it.

That is normal and it is not a failure of attention. This does not happen on a day. It happens the way a road goes from one county to another, without a line, and the only way anybody notices is that the ground eventually looks different.

You noticed. Three weeks ago, in a lay-by. That is not a small thing and it is not something you produced.

You were shown something rather than working it out, and the showing is itself an answer. It is written that no one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him (John 6:44), and it is the Holy Spirit who does that drawing, which means the question that arrived out of nowhere in a lay-by was not out of nowhere.

And the eleven names.

You pray for eleven people by name and mean every one of them and have done for years. That is not a mechanism running on empty. That is love, held steady over a long time, by a man who has never mentioned it.

You have been doing something genuinely warm for years while believing you had gone cold. Scripture says God is not unjust so as to overlook your work and the love you have shown for His name in serving the saints (Hebrews 6:10), and it is His Spirit who has kept eleven names alive in a man's mouth every morning for years, which nobody sustains on discipline alone.