New Every Morning

Ah, the gentle early morning sound of children arguing. It's like a brisk cup of coffee to launch you into the new day. We've all woken up a few minutes later than yesterday and some of us, not me, are chattering along with lots to say. Having taken my own internal and emotional temperature (lying there inquiring of myself, How Am I Really) I am happy to report that I'm feeling seismically better. I even feel like standing on my feet and maybe going around doing something today. Which is good, because today is the last day we get to be with our, well, not mine but the children's, beloved grandparents. And so we need to eek out every moment of fun and happiness. And then they will go have a rest cure from us and we will carry on swimming and eating too much for a short while until the appointed time that we turn our steps back up north.

One of the questions I've been asking myself every morning of this holiday, in the way that I encourage other people Not To Do, is Am I Ready to Go Home. The answer is still no, but it's a less emphatic no. It has become a meh, which is much better. I think in a week it will probably be I Guess So.

This business is taking my temperature every morning–and I don't actually take my temperature because I don't have a thermometer, I just self diagnose my mood and feelings–I realize, I know, I believe very strongly, is a terribly Bad Thing to do. What can be gained by it? Immediately my mind begins to buzz with things I have to do, matched along side the discovery that I have neither the energy nor the desire to do any of them. So then I lie there, for like who even knows how long, covered with the blankets of Despaire and Desperate Helplessness.

This is the opposite of how Matt wakes up. His alarm goes off at 3, or 2 or whatever, and he leaps up with a song on his lips and goes off to live a happy untroubled life. It takes all kinds, I suppose. We can't both be crippled with self loathing first thing before breakfast. Who would make the breakfast?

So anyway, the astonishing thing is that, as I am lying there enumerating to myself and to God the great burden of my day and my life, trying to remember who it is that I've promised to pray for, trying to judge truly the measure and nature of my own energy, both physical and mental, somehow it always occurs to me to turn on the bible. I assume this is God'd doing, because it is a surprise every day. His mercies, as they say, are new every morning, mainly because I start out in exactly the same place every single day. So I flip on the bible, and the nice man reads it to me, and, most strangely, the more I listen to how Bad Things Are, and how Bad I Am, because that's really what the bible says, in many different ways, over and over again, I am strengthened and comforted. I suppose by now I should expect it. But really I am genuinly shocked over and over.

Take, for instance, the long weird passage in Ezekiel where God tells him to cook his food on human dung and Ezekiel is pretty shocked and uncomfortable with the idea and complains and so God says, fine fine, cook it on cow dung, and Ezekiel is ok with that. Well, he's probably not ok, but he stops fussing. And the word of the Lord comes to Ezekiel in a long depressing chapter about how evil Israel is and how this is going to be what happens to them. And as I'm listening, it's not that I'm thinking anything in particular, it's just that I feel awfully fortified, like I can stagger forth and do something or other. Most especially, it arrests completely my evil temperature taking, and somehow stops me thinking about myself at all. I don't know how it happens. It's not like the bible is exactly pertinent to every moment of my existence. It doesn't make sense that all the promise of judgement would make me feel so cheerful, but it really does.

So there you are. The Bible. It's petty good for what ails ya.