A quiet morning

"Let me hear of your steadfast love in the morning, for in you I put my trust. Teach me the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul." — Psalm 143:8

The morning after a heavy day is its own kind of mercy.

I was up at the usual time, the coffee made, the Bible open on the table. The screen door was open to the back and there was enough of a breeze that I could hear the wind chime Earl's mother gave us the year we moved in, which I have never liked the sound of and have never taken down. It has been on that hook for forty-seven years. It has outlasted several of the things I thought I liked better.

I did not try to pray anything complicated. I sat with the coffee and the open Bible and let the morning do what the morning was going to do. Some days the prayer is an effort, a deliberate thing, a hauling of yourself to the table and sitting there until something comes. Some days the prayer is already in the room when you get there and all you have to do is not interrupt it.

This was the second kind of morning.

Biscuit came in from outside and put his chin on my foot under the table, which is where he puts it when he has decided the walk can wait. I let him decide. The Bible was open to the Psalms and I was not reading them so much as being near them, the way a person sits near a fire not because she is cold but because the fire is good company.

I have come to think that these mornings are worth more than the ones where I show up and do the work and feel the effort of it. The effort mornings are good and I do not dismiss them. But the mornings where the prayer is already there, where the work is just sitting down and letting it happen, those mornings are the ones that keep me coming back to the table.

The coffee is at its second cup. The breeze has picked up and the wind chime is at it again. I will walk Biscuit when I finish this cup, and we will go down the road to the curve and back, and the morning will be a warm one.