Six in the Morning Again

Nothing about this is interesting, which is exactly why I want to write about it.

It is dark. Something in the house needs feeding, or letting out, or both, and it is not going to wait, and there is no version of the morning where you get to negotiate. So you are up, in the cold bit of the day, doing the same eight actions in the same order that you did yesterday and will do tomorrow.

You do not think of this as anything. If somebody asked what you did this morning you would not mention it. It has dropped below the threshold of things worth saying, along with brushing your teeth.

And I want to bring it back above that threshold for a minute, because I do not think it belongs down there, and because a person who has been doing something faithfully for years and has stopped noticing is usually carrying more than they know.

The proverb takes it seriously

There is a proverb about this and it is more striking than people realize, because of the company it keeps.

A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel. (Proverbs 12:10, King James Version)

Look at what is being contrasted.

This is not a verse about being fond of animals. It is placed in a book of proverbs about character, in a line that sets one kind of person against another, and the marker it uses to tell them apart is how somebody treats a creature that cannot argue back.

Regardeth. It means to notice, to attend to, to keep in mind. It is not a word about affection. It is a word about attention paid to something that has no way of demanding it.

Proverbs 12:10 puts the daily care of an animal into a description of a righteous life rather than into a hobby, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets that land on somebody standing in a cold kitchen at six.

You are doing something Scripture treats as a mark of character, and it has never once been beneath notice. Proverbs 12:10 makes the regard a person shows a beast the dividing line in a proverb about righteousness, and the Holy Spirit is the one who raises an ordinary morning back up to what it actually is.

Nobody sees the keeping

Here is why it dropped below the threshold, and it is not because you undervalue it.

It is because keeping is invisible by design. The only time anybody notices the keeping is when it stops. A fed animal produces no event. A watered plant produces nothing to report. Almost all of the actual sustaining work in the world is like this, and none of it shows up anywhere.

So you have years of mornings behind you and there is no record of a single one, and there is nothing to point at, and the natural conclusion of a reasonable person is that it therefore did not amount to anything.

That conclusion is wrong, and Proverbs 12:10 is one of the places the Holy Spirit says so out loud, by writing the invisible thing into the description rather than leaving it out.

You have built something invisible, and the absence of a record has never once meant an absence of substance. The written word describes a righteous person by an act that leaves no trace, and the Spirit of God is the one who counts what nothing else has counted.

Doing it on purpose

Now, the small thing I want you to do, and it is not extra work.

Do it slowly. Once. Today.

Not everything, and not every day. Just the ordinary feeding or letting out or refilling, done deliberately rather than in the automatic haze it has been done in for the last however many hundred mornings.

The reason is not that God prefers slow feeding. It is that a thing done on purpose is experienced, and a thing done automatically is not, and you have been having an experience for years without noticing you were having it.

And while you do it, say thank you out loud. Not for the animal, particularly. Just thank you, into an ordinary kitchen, because it is true and because saying it turns a chore back into something with a direction, and Proverbs 12:10 already treats the direction as real, and the Holy Spirit is present in it whether or not anybody mentions Him.

You are able to be present in something you have done a thousand times, and it has never once needed to be a new thing to be worth doing. Proverbs 12:10 names an ordinary daily regard rather than a grand act, and the Spirit of God is the one who is genuinely in a cold kitchen before it is light.