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# The light this morning
- URL: https://www.rubyskitchentable.com/the-light-this-morning/
- Published: 2026-08-10T10:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-10T09:59:59.000Z
- Author: Ruby Hayes
- Tags: devotional, Week 12, #087

*"I sought the LORD, and he answered me, and delivered me from all my fears."* — Psalm 34:4

The light through the kitchen window this morning was different and I sat with it for a while before I opened the journal.

It is not the angle. It is not the color exactly. It is something about the quality of August morning light that I cannot name but that my body recognizes the way it recognizes the smell of rain before the rain starts. The light is thinner. Cooler at the edges. The sun is still coming up over the same ridge it has come up over for forty-seven years of mornings in this house, but it is coming up into a different month, and the month shows.

I opened the journal and the list was there. The names have not changed much since June. Becca and her family. Dan and his. Hannah. The woman at church who lost her husband. Edna and her hip. Pastor Holloway. The boy's father. A few others I have added along the way, people I have promised to pray for and meant it.

I said the names. I did not linger on any of them this morning. Some mornings the prayer is a conversation and some mornings the prayer is a list and some mornings the list is enough. This was a list morning. I said each name the way you say good morning to someone you pass on the sidewalk. Not because they are not important but because the saying itself is the importance and the saying does not need to be long.

Dan will call tomorrow evening. He calls every Tuesday around eight and I have come to set my week by it the way I used to set my week by Wednesday mornings at the library. There are rhythms that replace the ones you lose. They are not the same rhythms but they hold the same space.

The coffee was good. Biscuit was on the porch. Junebug was on the windowsill in the patch of thin light that I have been trying to describe and she seemed to understand it better than I do. She was asleep in it. That is probably the right response.

*Lord, thank you for the names on the list and the light through the window and the mornings that ask nothing more than showing up.*