The Brush Tells Me Every Morning

My grandmother used to say that a day gets its shape in the first ten minutes and then spends the rest of itself living up to it.

She was talking about temper. She meant that if you start out short with somebody, you will be short all day and blame the day for it.

I have thought about that for fifty years and I think she was right, and I think about it every time a woman tells me about the brush.

Because here is what actually happens in your house at about half past six.

You brush your hair. And then you look at the brush. And the brush says something, and whatever it says is the first piece of news you receive, before the kettle, before the radio, before a single word from another human being.

That is a great deal of authority to hand to an object with no opinions.

And I want to be plain about what I am not going to do. I am not going to tell you it does not matter, and I am not going to tell you what is on the brush is normal, because you have been told that and it did not change one morning.

What I want to look at is the order. What comes first, and what gets to speak first, and whether anything else has ever been allowed to.

First news sets the day

There is something about a first thing that everybody knows and nobody applies here.

A first thing frames everything after it. Whatever arrives first becomes the lens, and everything for the next few hours gets read through it, and that is not weakness or drama. It is how attention works in every person who has ever lived.

Which means the brush is not one small unpleasant moment in a morning. It is the frame the whole morning goes inside.

You are handing the frame of a day to an object at half past six, and a brush has never once been in a position to open anything. The Holy Spirit is what shows a woman where the shape of a day actually gets set, and Lamentations 3 says what is new every morning and who is putting it there.

And notice what has been quietly lost.

Brushing your hair used to be nothing. It was not an event. It was the same category of act as putting a kettle on, which is to say completely unremarkable and slightly pleasant.

It has been converted into an information gathering exercise, and there is no version of it now where it is not one, because the looking has become part of the movement. Whatever else that is, it is not care.

You are collecting data at an hour when nothing needs collecting, and a brush has never once been an instrument. Scripture in Lamentations 3 says His compassions are new every morning, which is a first thing put deliberately at the start of a day, and the Spirit of God is the one who changes what speaks first.

New every morning

The third chapter of Lamentations is written by a man in the worst circumstance in the book, and in the middle of it he says this.

It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. (Lamentations 3:22 and 23, King James Version)

New every morning.

Not renewed weekly. Not available on request. New every morning, which means placed there, at the start, before anything else in the day has happened.

There is already a first thing in your morning and it was put there before you woke up.

You are met by something that arrives before the brush does, and there has never once been a morning it was not already there. It is written in Lamentations 3 that His compassions are new every morning, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman notice what was in the room first.

And it matters enormously who is saying it.

Jeremiah is not a man having a good week. He is writing in the middle of a national catastrophe, having watched things nobody should watch. This is not somebody with an easy life saying a cheerful thing about mornings.

He is saying it from underneath, which is the only place a sentence like that is worth anything.

You are given a sentence that was written from underneath rather than from comfort, and it has never once required a good week to be true. The Spirit of God is what makes a hard man's sentence land on an ordinary morning, and the written word says great is thy faithfulness.

One sentence before you leave the room

So here is the assignment, and it is about order rather than content.

Tomorrow, put the brush down and say one true kind sentence out loud before you leave the room.

Not instead of looking. Look if you look. I am not asking you to change what your eyes do at half past six, because that would be a rule about a glance and it would not hold.

Say the sentence after, and before you leave. That is the whole of it.

You are given one sentence to say and nothing at all to fix, and a morning has never once required a report out of you. Lamentations 3 says they are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness, and the Holy Spirit is what meets a woman at a brush before she leaves the house.

Something small and true. My hands are warm. I slept well. My daughter is coming Saturday. His mercies are new this morning. Anything that is true and is not about the brush.

Here is why it works. You cannot stop something from being first. But you can decide what gets to be last in that room, and last is what you carry through the door with you, and the door is where the morning actually begins.

You are able to decide what leaves that room with you, and the brush has never once had the right to be the last word in it. The written word in Lamentations 3 puts new mercies at the front of every morning, and the Holy Spirit is what turns one spoken sentence into care rather than into a technique.