I Woke Because He Needed Me

I want to say something at the top of this one, before anything else, and I want it said plainly rather than tucked away.

If things are dark enough that you are wondering whether you want to be here, please tell somebody today. A doctor, a helpline, a person in your house, anybody with a name and a face. That is not a formality and it is not me covering myself. It is the most important sentence on this page and it goes first.

Now, this article.

There is a thing people say lightly and mean completely, and it is: if it were not for him needing feeding I do not know that I would get up.

It gets said in a joking voice, usually. It is not a joke. And most people who say it have never once said it in a serious voice to anybody, because the joking voice is what makes it possible to say at all.

He kept me while I was not doing anything

There is a short line in the Psalms about sleeping and waking that I think is one of the most quietly important sentences in the book.

I laid me down and slept; I awaked; for the LORD sustained me. (Psalm 3:5, King James Version)

Look at the causation in it.

He did not wake up and then get sustained. He woke up because he was sustained. The sustaining happened during the part where he was doing nothing at all, which is the part he had no involvement in whatsoever.

David wrote that while running from his own son. It is not a peaceful psalm and he is not describing a good week. He is describing the ordinary fact of having woken up, and he credits it to somebody other than himself.

Psalm 3:5 puts God underneath the unconscious hours rather than in the achievements of the day, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets that reach somebody who is not sure they wanted to wake up.

You were sustained through the night, and it has never once depended on you being able to do anything. Psalm 3:5 credits the waking to the LORD rather than to the sleeper, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a fact somebody can hold on a morning they did not want.

I am not taking the animal away

Now I want to be careful about something, because there is a version of this message that does harm.

The wrong version says: God should be your reason, not the dog. And a person hears that as an instruction to feel something they do not currently feel, on top of everything else, and it lands as one more failure.

So let me say it the other way round. The animal getting you up is not a problem to be corrected. It is a mercy, and it is the ordinary way God does a great deal of His work, which is through something with a body that needs something at a specific hour.

You do not have to upgrade your reason. You have to get up, and it is genuinely fine that a creature is the thing that does it. Psalm 3:5 credits the sustaining to God without describing the mechanism, and the Holy Spirit is entirely willing to work through a bowl that needs filling.

You are being held up by something God put in that room, and it has never once been a lesser reason. The written word says the LORD sustained me without specifying how, and the Spirit of God is the one who works through ordinary creatures with ordinary needs at half past six.

The one thing I am asking for

Here is the part that is actually the assignment, and it is not about the animal.

Tell one person that today was hard.

Not the whole thing. Not an explanation. Six words: today was hard, and I am tired. To one human being, out loud or in a message, today.

The reason is that the joking voice has been doing all the carrying, and the joking voice is load-bearing but it is not enough on its own, and a person who says the true version out loud once is in a completely different position from a person who has never said it.

You are not asking for anything. You are just ending the part where you are the only one who knows.

You are allowed to say the true version out loud, and it has never once required a crisis to justify it. Psalm 3:5 has a man in genuine trouble state the plain fact of his own survival, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes an honest sentence possible for somebody who has been managing with a joke.