Dawn Comes Up Slow

Quarter to five, and the alley is the same color it was at midnight.

He has the keys out before he is out of the truck, because there are three of them and one is stiff and he has been doing this since he was twenty-six. The back door sticks at the bottom in the damp. He puts a shoulder into it the way he always does, and the smell of the kitchen comes out at him, old fryer oil and bleach and yesterday, and he props it open with the brick.

Hood fan. Lights over the line, the far one still buzzing. The walk-in door, which he opens and closes for no reason at all, every single morning, like a man checking that the world is still there.

He puts a pot of coffee on for himself before he does anything else. That is his. Nobody else in the family knows that these twenty minutes exist.

Then he carries out yesterday's cardboard, and that is the part where it happens, because the dumpster is at the far end of the parking lot, and to get back he has to walk toward the east side of the building.

And the sky over the roofline is not black anymore.

It is not light. Nobody would call it light. It is that thing it does where you cannot name the color, and where you would swear it was the same as when you carried the boxes out, except that you can now see the edge of the roof against it, and you could not before.

He stands there in the middle of an empty parking lot at quarter to five with his hands empty.

And what is going through his head is a list.

By Christmas. That is the date. He has had it since August, when something happened at a family thing and he heard his own voice from across a room and did not like the man it belonged to. By Christmas, he wants to be a different man than that. Not perfect. Just different enough that when they are all around a table at Christmas he does not have to hold his breath.

He does the arithmetic in the parking lot. He does it every morning now. So many weeks. He wonders if that is enough weeks.

And he can hear how it sounds. That is what makes it worse. He is fifty-three years old, he has known the Lord since his twenties, and he is standing in the dark trying to negotiate a delivery date on his own soul.

The sky over the roof is a little further along than it was.

You have a date too. Maybe it is a birthday, maybe an anniversary, maybe just a January that you have decided is going to be different. And you can hear how it sounds, or you would not be here.

Nobody has ever seen it get lighter

Stand outside for an hour before sunrise and try to catch the moment. It cannot be done, and inattention is not the reason. There is no moment to catch. A man looks up and it is dark, and later he looks up and the wires are visible against the sky, and in between there was no event.

Solomon knew this and he built a whole proverb on it.

But the path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day.Proverbs 4:18

More and more. That is the phrase. Not a switch, not a flash, not a moment somebody can point at. Increasing light, on a road, on a walking man.

You are on that path already, in the dark, at quarter to five, whether or not you can see one thing to prove it. Proverbs 4:18 says the path of the just is that shining light, and the Spirit is the one who makes an old line in a proverb true in an empty parking lot, so the darkness in the alley behind you is not evidence against the sky in front of you.

And notice who is not doing the work in that verse. The dawn is not something the man on the road produces by walking harder. He walks. It gets lighter. Those two facts are in the same sentence and they are not causally related in the direction he would like.

You have been trying to manufacture a sunrise, and the sun has not once required your help. Scripture puts the increase on the light and the walking on the man, and it is His Spirit doing that work at an hour when nobody is awake to appreciate it.

The date you are holding

Let me say something about Christmas, because I am not going to pretend you did not bring it.

That date is not stupid. It is not fleshly and it is not something to repent of. It came from a real moment in August when you heard yourself and did not like it, and underneath the date is a good and holy desire to stop being that man in front of the people you love. I would not take that desire off you for anything.

But look at what has happened to it. A thing God is doing now has a delivery date stapled to the side of it, and the arithmetic runs every morning in a parking lot at quarter to five, and arithmetic does to a man exactly what arithmetic does. It has turned a gift into a deadline, and it has made every ordinary Tuesday from here to there into either progress or failure.

So here is what I will not do. I am not going to hand you a different date, a better one, a more realistic one. I am not going to tell you what you are going to be like at Christmas, or at Easter, or a year from now, because I do not know, and any man who tells you he does is selling something. And I am not leaving you with a plan at the bottom of this page. There is no program here. There is no framework. God has never once worked to my calendar, and He has never run you and another man side by side to see who is further along the road.

You are not behind, and you were never on a clock that God was reading. The written word says a thousand years are like a day to Him, and the Spirit who is doing this work in you is not consulting the calendar on the back of your office door.

One degree of it is a real thing

Here is what you can have, and it is not a consolation prize. It is the actual thing.

Today's light. The amount on the ground right now, at this hour, in this parking lot. Not the full day. One degree of it, arriving the way it always arrives, without asking anybody whether the kitchen was ready for it.

Paul says we are changed from one degree of glory to another. One. Then another. Nobody gets the whole thing handed to them in a single morning, and nobody is asked to hold the whole thing up either.

You have today's degree already, and it landed before you woke up. 2 Corinthians 3:18 puts the transforming on the Lord who is the Spirit rather than on the person being transformed, which is why the light on the roofline did not wait for you to carry the boxes out.

And I want to say the plain thing here, because it is not a footnote at the bottom of the page. If the reason you want a deadline is that the mornings have gotten heavy, if you are getting up at four because you are not really sleeping, then bringing a person in beside you is not a detour around God, it is very often the route He takes. See a doctor, because a flat gray weight that never lifts is frequently something in the body, and it is treatable. See a counselor, somebody who has already heard the thing you would be embarrassed to say and did not flinch at it. Tell one friend all of it. And if the drive in at half past four has started carrying the notion that the family and the restaurant would both manage fine without you, call 988 today, or whatever crisis line covers your county, and have somebody with you in that kitchen before the shift starts.

You are the kind of man other people are meant to carry, and that is not a demotion. In Mark 2 four men took a roof apart to get their friend in front of Jesus, and the written account says Jesus saw their faith, not his, and it is the Spirit who moves people to carry a man they cannot cure.