The Day the Alarm Stopped Mattering

The alarm was for a quarter to six for nineteen years. He turned it off in March and did not set it again.

For the first three weeks he woke at a quarter to six anyway, which he found funny and told people about. By May he was waking at seven, then at eight, and one morning in June he woke at twenty past ten and lay there for a while working out whether that was a problem.

The thing that ended was a caring arrangement rather than a job. His father needed somebody at a certain hour every day and he was the somebody, and the hour was a quarter to six because of what had to be done before work. His father died in February. The alarm went off in March out of habit and he turned it off and that was the last one.

He is fifty-four. He is not depressed, or at least the doctor and he have discussed it carefully and have both landed on tired and unstructured rather than that. He goes to work. He does what needs doing. He is not falling apart.

What he has lost, and has no words for, is that his days had a starting pin in them and it has been pulled. Everything hung off a quarter to six. Not the tasks, the shape. Take the pin out and the whole thing does not collapse, it just goes shapeless, and shapeless turns out to be more tiring than early.

Anybody whose day was built around somebody else's need knows this. And I want to say straight away that I am not going to hand anybody a routine. No morning system, no framework. A man who has just had a structure removed by a death does not need to be issued another one to fail at.

Teach us to number

Let me put a line down and pay attention to who is asked to do the teaching.

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.Psalm 90:12

Teach us. It is a request, addressed to God, for instruction in something a person cannot generate. Moses does not write a method for numbering days. He asks to be taught the numbering, which is a strange enough thing to ask for that it is worth stopping on.

Because numbering days is not counting them. It is a knowing of the value of a day, and Moses, who wrote this psalm and who had spent decades in a wilderness with no calendar and no fixed address, knew perfectly well that days do not number themselves.

You are taught the numbering of your days by God rather than by having a structure to hang them on. That is not a soft word for a man waking at twenty past ten. It is what is written in Psalm 90, and it is His Spirit who takes a written line and puts it into a courtyard in the morning. The alarm was a pin. The numbering is God's to teach.

And it is worth saying where that psalm goes at the end, because it is the same psalm that closes with a request for God to establish the work of the reader's hands. It is a psalm about shapeless time that asks for the shape to be given rather than built.

You have a psalm that asks God to establish the work of your hands, and it was written by a man with no fixed address at all. Psalm 90:17 is the text this sits on, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old prayer land in a man at a low table in the first sun.

The pin came out with a person attached to it

Now the tender part, and it goes first.

What has been lost here is not a routine. It is a person, and the routine was the shape that person made in his days, and taking it apart into two separate losses is dishonest to both.

He would not say he is grieving. He would say he is unstructured. And that is worth being gentle about rather than correcting, because a man who is not ready to call it grief is not being obtuse, he is going at the speed he can go at.

But it means something for what comes next. A new alarm at a quarter to six would not restore the shape, and he knows this instinctively, which is why he has not set one. The pin was not a time. The pin was his father needing him at that time.

Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints.Psalm 116:15

That is not a verse about coping. It is a verse about how a death is regarded, and it puts a weight on it rather than moving it along.

You were carrying something with weight in it, and the shapelessness is the size of what has gone. Psalm 116:15 is where the word puts it, and His Spirit is the one who lets a man call a thing heavy without having to name it grief before he is ready.

You are held right now, at twenty past ten in the morning, with nothing to get up for and the day still God's. It is written that He is asked to teach the numbering of days and to establish the work of our hands, and it is the Spirit who makes that true in a man who woke at a quarter to six for nineteen years.

If any of this ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and go back to that doctor and mention the mornings again. The line between tired and something heavier is not one a person can see from inside, and being held by God has never been a reason to go without a real person in the room.