Whether It Carried Over

The tear went right through the middle of a page, and Mrs Okonjo carried the book in wrapped in a tea towel.

It was her mother's, and her grandmother's before that, and the tear was in Isaiah, and it had happened during a house move in a way she did not want to describe in any detail. She put it on the bench and unwrapped it and then stood back with her hands together as though she had brought in a patient.

The binder is a quiet man called Tomas who has been doing this for thirty-one years and who talks to almost nobody until he is working, at which point he cannot stop.

He mends it with tissue so thin you can read straight through it, and wheat paste, and a brush with about nine hairs left in it, and he presses it under a board and a weight overnight.

She comes back on the Thursday. She looks at it for a long time.

Then she says, "Will it hold?"

He says yes.

She turns the page carefully, and back, and forward again. And she says, "But what about when somebody turns it?"

And Tomas, who is not a sentimental man, does something unusual. He takes the book, and he opens it flat, and he puts his thumb right on the mend, and he presses.

"Feel that," he says. "Come here. Feel it."

She touches it.

"That is the strongest part of this page now," he says. "The paper is a hundred years old and it is tired everywhere. The mend is not. If this book ever tears again, and it might, it will tear somewhere else. It will not tear here."

She comes back the next Thursday anyway, and the one after that. Twice she rings to ask about humidity. Tomas is patient about it, because he has been doing this thirty-one years and he knows what people are really asking when they ask about humidity.

And on the fourth Thursday she comes in and does not ask, and just sits down with a coffee, and looks out the window, and says, "It is only that it was the last thing my mother held."

Now. You wake up, and before your feet are on the floor, you check.

Not consciously, at first. It is more like a hand going to a pocket. Is it still all right. Is what happened yesterday still in force this morning, or has the night reset something, and do I begin today owing?

And if you slept badly, or if you dreamed about it, the check comes back inconclusive, and you get up into a day that already has a shadow across it before the kettle is on.

Let me tell you what the morning actually is.

New before you were awake

Jeremiah is sitting in the ruins of everything he warned about, and in the middle of the worst poem in the Bible he says this.

The Lord's lovingkindnesses indeed never cease, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22 to 23

Notice where he is when he says it. He is not on a good day. He is in a city that has fallen, and the line is not optimism, it is the only fixed point he has left.

They are new every morning. Not renewed on application. Not reissued once you have checked in. New, already, when the morning arrives, which means they were made new while you were asleep and not consulted.

So hear this, and hear it as the thing it is. You have a mercy this morning that was already new before you opened your eyes, and the check you performed before your feet were on the floor did not affect the supply by one drop. That is written down in the middle of a lament by a man who had every reason to say the opposite, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line like that and lays it across a person's chest at seven in the morning.

Now let me untangle something for you, because you are a careful reader and a careful reader deserves the actual distinction.

There is a real thing called walking in the light, and a real thing called keeping short accounts, and neither of them means what your morning check has turned them into.

Keeping short accounts is what you do with a thing you become aware of. It takes about nine seconds and it is warm, and it happens between people who are already at peace. It is a wife saying sorry, that came out wrong in a car, not a subject filing a petition.

What you are doing is different. You are performing a daily audit to establish whether the relationship still exists, and that is not short accounts, that is a person waking up every morning to check that they are still married.

And Scripture never once frames it that way. It says His compassions never fail, and never is a word with no gaps in it, and there is no clause anywhere about a nightly expiry.

Here is the mend, and I want you to put your thumb on it.

Your forgiveness is not resting on last night's transaction. It rests on a work finished at a point in history that does not repeat and does not decay, and that is why the mend is the strongest part of the page. Everything else about you is a hundred years old and tired. That one place is not. If something in your life gives way this week, and it might, it will not give way there.

You are held this morning by something newer than you are, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a written faithfulness into a felt steadiness, in His timing rather than on your schedule.

There was a man five hundred years ago who was so troubled by the morning question that he eventually wrote the answer on his desk, in chalk, so that he would see it before he saw anything else: I have been baptized. Past tense. A thing that had happened to him, outside of him, which no bad night and no bad dream could reach. He did not write I feel forgiven. He wrote a fact that had a date on it, and he read it back to himself on the mornings when nothing inside him agreed.