My Ten Minutes Is At Breakfast

Everything written about this assumes an evening.

The hour after supper. The table with the lamp on. The parent who comes in from work and sits down at seven.

And you work nights, or you work early, or your shift rotates, and at seven in the evening you are either asleep or forty minutes into something.

So your ten minutes happens at twenty past seven in the morning, with cereal, and one of you not fully awake, and the bus in eleven minutes.

And you have been quietly deducting something for that. Not consciously. But there is a sense that yours is an improvised version of a thing other people do properly.

And it does work. That is worth saying before anything else. Whatever happens at that table in the eleven minutes before the bus is real, and it happens most days, and it has been happening for a long time. The trouble is entirely in what you have been calling it.

In the morning will I direct my prayer

There is a line in Psalm 5 that names a time of day deliberately.

My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O LORD; in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee, and will look up. (Psalm 5:3, King James Version)

In the morning, twice, in one verse. The psalmist is not apologizing for the hour. He is specifying it.

And there are other psalms that specify other hours. There is one about the night watches. There is one about seven times a day. Scripture keeps naming times, and it never ranks them.

You are looking at a book that has never once put one hour above another for the things that matter. Psalm 5:3 names the morning without comparing it to anything, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a fact about a breakfast table.

And notice what the verse actually asks for. Direct my prayer, and look up. Those are acts, and they belong to the person doing them, and the time of day is simply where they happen to be standing.

You were never doing a variant, and no hour anywhere has ever once been the standard against which the others were measured. The written word names the morning as a location rather than a qualification, and the Spirit of God is the one who removes a ranking a person absorbed from everybody else's assumptions.

Where the deduction came from

Let me name where the feeling actually comes from, because it did not come from you.

It came from the fact that everything written about this is written for one shape of household. The evening version is described, and the morning version is not described, and what is not described feels like a substitute.

That is not evidence about your ten minutes. It is evidence about who is doing the writing.

You have been comparing yourself to a description rather than to a standard, and a description has never once been a rule. Psalm 5:3 names an hour without ranking it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a person where their own deduction came from.

And there is something genuinely better about your version that nobody will have mentioned to you, so let me mention it.

A morning ten minutes happens before the day has taken anything. Nobody in that kitchen has been worn down yet. Whatever is in the tank is at its fullest, for both of you.

An evening ten minutes happens at the end of two long days, one of them a child's, and the child's day is genuinely long.

That is not a reason to be smug about it. It is a reason to stop deducting.

You have been running the version with the most fuel in it, and no evening anywhere has ever once had more of a person left in it than a morning does. The written word specifies a morning as a real time to do a real thing, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a parent count what they actually have.

You were never improvising, and nobody has ever once been improvising by doing a thing at the time it fits. Psalm 5:3 names the hour plainly, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the apology out of a schedule.

Write down the time it happens

So here is the assignment, and it is one piece of information.

Do your ten minutes at whatever hour it actually happens, and write the time of day on a piece of paper.

Twenty past seven. Half past six. Quarter to nine at night on a Sunday, if that is when yours is.

And then leave the paper where you will see it, with nothing else written on it.

You are permitted to write your own hour down without a note beside it, and a plain time has never once needed to be justified to anybody. Psalm 5:3 specifies a morning and compares it to nothing, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present when a card goes up by a kettle.

What that does is make the hour a fact rather than a compromise. At the moment it is a thing you know about and slightly wince at. Written down, in numbers, on a piece of paper, it becomes simply when this happens in this house.

And if it changes when your shift changes, write the new one underneath, and let the paper have several times on it, because a household with a rotating shift genuinely does have several, and that is a fact rather than a failure.

Psalm 5:3 names the morning without ranking it against any other hour, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is at a kitchen table where a time gets written down without an apology.

You are permitted to name your own hour, and a time written plainly has never once been a confession. The written word specifies the morning as the place the thing happens, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present at twenty past seven.

You have a ten minutes that has never once been scored against the clock. Psalm 5:3 names an hour and ranks nothing, and it is the Holy Spirit who ends a deduction nobody ever charged.