At five in the morning the house makes four sounds and she knows every one of them. The refrigerator, which comes on and goes off. The pipe behind the wall upstairs that ticks when the heat kicks in. A car, sometimes, one street over, somebody going to work earlier than her. And the clock in the hall, which she cannot hear at any other hour of the day and which at five is practically shouting.
She sits in the same chair. Three winters in that chair. It is the best hour of her day and it is the loneliest hour of her day, and she has never once been able to explain to anybody how a thing manages to be both.
There is a particular thought that arrives about ten minutes in, and it arrives every single time, and it goes: I am the only person awake. Not in the house. On the earth. She knows that is not true. Knowing it has never made the slightest difference to the arrival.
You have a chair like that. Maybe it is five, maybe it is two, maybe it is whatever hour the pain wakes you up at. And you say something to God into a room so quiet you can hear yourself swallow, and some part of you files the whole exchange as a message sent from a very long way out, on a frequency nobody else is on.
The sun is coming up on somebody
For from the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same my name shall be great among the Gentiles; and in every place incense shall be offered unto my name, and a pure offering: for my name shall be great among the heathen, saith the LORD of hosts.Malachi 1:11
Sit with the size of that sentence for a second. From the rising of the sun to the going down of it. In every place. This is a promise about geography and about the clock at the same time, and it was made through a prophet to people who had shrunk their idea of God down to one small building and were doing a tired job of it.
He tells them what He is actually doing. Not here only. Everywhere. Not at the appointed hour only. All the way across the day, one end to the other.
You are inside something that has been going without a break for a very long time, and your five in the morning is not the outer edge of it. Malachi 1:11 is where that stands written, and the Holy Spirit is what makes one sentence said in a dark room part of a sound much bigger than the room.
And here is the plain fact underneath the poetry. The earth turns. There is no hour on it when the sun is not coming up somewhere. So there is no hour when there is not a kitchen light going on and somebody sitting down with a cup and starting to say what you say. Your five in the morning is a woman's noon. It is somebody else's last hour before sleep, praying with the day already spent.
You have never once prayed alone at that hour, not in three winters of it. The word says in every place, and His Spirit does not measure any of this in miles.
The miles were never given any authority
Now the harder thing, the one the loneliness actually runs on. It is not really the belief that nobody else is awake. It is the suspicion that being far off makes you a lesser member. That the ones in the room together are the real thing and you are a signal from the outskirts, faithfully received, filed under unusual circumstances.
There is no such category. There is no waiting list, no provisional tier, no reduced portion for the ones who are not near anybody. Malachi did not write in every place except the isolated ones. He wrote in every place, and a woman in a chair at five in the morning is a place.
It is already yours in full, this share among God's people, and the distance was never given a vote on the size of it. Malachi 1:11 settled it in writing and it has not been amended since, and His Spirit is what joined you in.
Nor is this a stretch of time to be got through. Nobody here is going to tell you that your chair is a waiting room, or that what you have now is the version you make do with. Whatever the years ahead hold about rooms and people, today is not a lesser day and this hour is not a lesser hour. The incense going up from your house at five is the pure offering the verse is talking about. Not a substitute for it.
You are offering something God calls pure, right there in the chair, and it was counted the first morning you did it. You have His word on it, in Malachi 1:11, and the Spirit puts no chair outside that promise either.
So let the thought come, and then let it be answered. I am the only one awake. No. At five, the sun is well up over a great many people who are saying what you are saying, in languages you do not have, with their own clocks ticking in their own halls.
You have been picturing yourself as a lone signal. Change the picture. You are one voice in a choir that is arranged around the planet rather than around a room, and choirs like that never stop, because the earth keeps turning and there is always a next place catching the light.
You have a place in something unbroken, and your part of it is not smaller for being far from everybody. His Spirit is what makes many people one people, and what He gathers them around is written at Malachi 1:11, from the rising of the sun to the going down of it.
Tomorrow at five the refrigerator will do the thing it does and the clock will be far too loud. None of that changes. What changes is what you think is happening in the room.
Declare this over yourself
You are not asking for anything in these three lines. You are saying what is already yours in Christ, and the standing to say it was given to you rather than earned by attendance anywhere. The Spirit makes the written word live as it leaves your mouth, and what He does with the years and the miles is His to decide. Say them into the quiet.
- Five in the morning in a silent house, you are not the edge of anything. Malachi 1:11 says the incense goes up in every place from the rising of the sun to the going down of it, and mine joins a fire that never went out. I am joined to them from this chair today.
- Thought that I am the only one awake, you are put out in the name of Jesus. The sun is coming up right now over people saying what I am saying, and the miles were never given a vote. I am one of them at this hour and at every other one.
- Lord, Your name is great from one end of the day to the other, and You called the offering from this house pure. You did not put my chair outside the promise. I am joined to Your people this morning, and the distance holds no authority over it.
Malachi 1:11
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.