I posted the Verse & Vision for today (Psalm 30:5) an hour ago. I could not help myself but to come back this hour and revisit it. It feels important to share what this verse actually did to me this morning.
It truly felt like God was trolling me. That happens often – almost daily, really. But today? It truly slapped me in the face. So hard it stung.
The funny part, if we are still allowed to call anything funny this early in the morning, is that just yesterday I told a friend I feel like God trolls me. Then, in the middle of that same day, something happened that felt like Him saying, “Okay. You paid attention. You were obedient. You took what you wanted to call trolling and received it as guidance from Me. So I will extend you this grace.”
That guidance He seemed to be rewarding me for being obedient to had come from yesterday’s verse of the day, by the way. And yes – then there was this grace. Obvious. Unmistakable. I was quick to give Him the credit. I told the stranger on the Internet who had left the comment that was the grace in my reply to their comment. I told my friend. I told my husband. I did not sit on the praise until I had processed it into something pretty. I just said it: that was God.
Then this morning, another God-troll.
Of course.
At 5:30 I opened an email about my son. In all these months (actually almost two years now, total) of fighting to get his medical testing approved by insurance, multiple times I’ve thought, “we’re making progress. It’s going to work out.” I really believed that a week ago. Then, this morning happened.
The email is dated more than a week ago. Somehow, I am only just now seeing it in my inbox. It is asking for more information. Some of that information is information and documentation I have already sent. Some of that information I have already sent multiple times. I sat there looking at a request that should not still exist and felt the day click into place.
I had already woken up in that energy. “Here we go. Another day.” Almost a dread of it.
Then the email: Yeah. There it is. “That’s why.“
I live from the soul, felt experience first – always before I consciously know or understand. Some part of me knows the weather of a day – the weather of almost everything – before I have language for it, even when I pretend I don’t, even when I try to ignore it. That feeling this morning was not me manifesting a shitty day. It was a warning that the day was already shaped that way. A lot of people would say different. That is not my reality.
So, I got my coffee. I tried to reset. I tried to overcome the anger about that specific email and the larger anger about my son so the whole day would not have to be what it already felt like. That is when I opened the Bible app. Verse of the day. I noted the chapter and verse, and immediately went to the actual Bible and looked it up in context.
Psalm 30:5.
For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favor is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning. (Psalm 30:5)
Really, God? This is what You are slapping me with when I come looking for comfort about the anger?
On paper it should be the perfect verse. Spot on. Custom-fit.
Anger is brief. Favor is life. Weeping lodges for a night. Joy shows up with the sun.
The way it went through me, though, was, “I am sick of this.“
I had already said that to my husband before any of this morning happened. I am so sick of waking up already exhausted. I am sick of already knowing it is going to be a battle. I am sick of starting everyday with the ritual of psyching myself up to survive war, so sick of my morning prayers being nothing but a battle cry that God be on my side – so sick of pretending it is not a battle, on the surface, so that I don’t inconvenience someone else with the battle.
I am so sick of the sense that the world is against me, against all of us.
Yes, the verse is comforting. But, two things can be – and often are – true at once. The verse is also infuriating, because how many mornings have I – have most of us – already woken up to the same damn thing?
Where is the joy that is supposed to suddenly arrive? On what morning? The one after I stop breathing? /insert cry laughing emoji here/
Here’s the deeper reality behind today’s verse:
The Hebrew under the pretty English is even more specific. Weeping is a traveler who comes to lodge for the night. A wayfarer, not a tenant. The line assumes morning will evict him. When the traveler unpacks and stays through season after season, the verse stops sounding like a promise and starts sounding like either a lie or a rebuke: why hasn’t your morning come?
Ok. Fine.
Let me be clear: I do not doubt God.
I am doubting whether the God I have come to believe I know, the God I expect, the One whose displeasure is a moment and whose favor rearranges the furniture by breakfast, is the God who is actually in this house with me. That is not atheism. That is the wreckage of a contract I did not know I was still holding.
If I am His, the night is supposed to be short. When it is not, the mind does what minds do. It stops asking the timeline to make sense and starts asking what the point is at all.
This is not, “make it make sense.“
It becomes, “What is the point.“
Psalm 30 is a dedication song. David is looking back from a house that got built, from a recovery that already happened, from the side of the night where he can say You turned my mourning into dancing. A few lines later he also admits that when God hid His face he was troubled. He is not pretending the dark was fine while he was in it.
In short? The verse is testimony after deliverance. It is not a stopwatch handed to people still in the pit.
I needed that distinction this morning, and I still hated it, because I do not want a theological footnote. I want the ordinary morning. The one where the email is not asking for papers I already sent. The one where my son is not another battlefield. The one where I do not wake up already tired of being alive in a body that has to do this again.
I am not going to spiritualize that away so the post can land clean. I refuse, despite the “modern” culture of believers, to pretend it is all peachy and positive in the process. That is never how it was supposed to work.
If there is any encouragement here, it is not “cheer up, joy is coming.” I have had enough mornings to know that sentence can be a kind of violence when the joy does not clock in. The only thing I can tell the truth about today is this:
I still believe the One who let that verse be written is in the night with the people the verse has not yet delivered. That is colder than “joy cometh.” It is also the only kind of faith that has ever lasted in my actual life – not the explanation, but the staying.
Weeping was only supposed to lodge for a night.
Mine brought a suitcase.
I am still here.
I made the coffee anyway.
I opened the Book anyway.
I told the truth anyway.
And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.
Come Lord, come.
What night in your life has overstayed the verse? What would it mean, not as a slogan, but as a body in a kitchen at 5:30 in the morning, to believe God is still there if the joy does not arrive on schedule?