My Twenty Minutes Are At The Wrong End Of The Day

Your free time arrives when the house is asleep.

That is the shape of it. You get in at eleven twenty and everybody has gone up. You get up at half past four and nobody will be awake for two hours.

Twenty minutes is available to you most days. It is simply available at five in the morning, which is not an hour anybody has ever described as family time.

So you have concluded that you do not have any, and the conclusion is so obvious that nobody has ever questioned it, including you.

Here is what I want to look at. Not the shifts, which are not going anywhere. The word family time, and who decided which hours it covers.

Because that phrase is doing a great deal of work in your head and it has no authority behind it. It came from somewhere, and it was not Scripture, and it is worth finding out what Scripture actually says about when a person is with God and with the people who belong to them.

I meditate on thee in the night watches

There is a line in Psalm 63 that names an hour nobody would choose and treats it as the best one available.

When I remember thee upon my bed, and meditate on thee in the night watches. Because thou hast been my help, therefore in the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice. (Psalm 63:6-7, King James Version)

Night watches. That is the middle of the night, in shifts, which is where the phrase comes from.

And the psalm does not apologize for the hour, does not treat it as second best, and does not wish it were morning.

You are a man with hours nobody has been counting, and five in the morning has never once been a lesser hour than seven at night. Psalm 63:6 puts the remembering in the night watches without a word of regret about the timing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can hand a man on shifts an hour he had written off.

And notice what is happening in those watches. Not sleeping badly. Remembering.

The hour is being used, deliberately, for something. It is not a leftover part of the night, it is the part of the night where a particular thing happens because that is when the person is awake.

You have been treating an hour as a leftover, and time nobody else is using has never once been time that counts for less. The Spirit of God is the one who reclassifies an hour in a man's own week, and it is written in Psalm 63 that the night watches were where the remembering happened.

And there is nothing in Scripture anywhere that names an hour as the family hour.

Deuteronomy names sitting, walking, lying down and rising up. Psalms names the night watches. Not one passage in the whole book picks out between six and eight in the evening.

You are able to look for a rule that does not exist, and an hour Scripture never once named has never once been the only hour that counts. It is written that the meditating happened in the night watches, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a phrase off a man that nobody in Scripture ever said.

Whose hours are they anyway

Now let me be practical about your actual week, because there is more in it than you think.

Half past four to half past six is yours and everybody is asleep. That one is genuinely unavailable and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

But half past six to a quarter past seven is not. Somebody in your house is awake in that window most days, and it is usually the same person, and they are alone.

You have a window most mornings that nobody has been counting, and forty five minutes before school has never once been a smaller stretch than forty five in the evening. The Spirit of God is the one who finds an hour a man has walked past for years, and Psalm 63 puts the remembering in the hours a person is actually awake.

And the morning has something the evening does not, which nobody ever says.

Nobody is tired. Nothing has gone wrong yet. There is no accumulated weather from the day, no argument from four o'clock still hanging about, and no one is at the end of anything.

You are able to have the best conditions in the house, and an early hour has never once been the difficult end of a day. It is written in Psalm 63 that the remembering in the watches led to rejoicing, and the Holy Spirit is the one at work in a kitchen at twenty to seven.

And the eleven twenty end is real too, on the nights somebody is still up.

That is the lying down that Deuteronomy names, and a boy of sixteen who is up at eleven twenty is available in a way he is not at seven in the evening with everybody else in the room.

You have both ends of a clock, and a man who works the middle of the day has never once been a man with no hours at all. The Spirit of God is the one who counts what a man actually has, and Scripture names the night watches without any apology for the hour.

Take the hour you have

Here is the instruction and it is a single decision.

Take the twenty minutes at the hour you actually have, whichever end of the clock it falls on.

Not the good hour. The available one. Twenty to seven in the morning, or eleven twenty at night, with whoever is awake in it.

You are able to use an hour nobody else values, and twenty minutes at an odd time have never once been odd to the person who got them. The Holy Spirit is the one at work at an hour nobody would have chosen, and Psalm 63:6 puts the remembering in the watches of the night.

And do not apologize for the hour. Not once, not as a joke.

Do not say sorry it has to be so early. Do not say I know this is a strange time. Every one of those tells the person in front of you that they are getting the substandard version, and they were not thinking that until you said it.

You have permission to treat an odd hour as an ordinary one, and an unremarked time has never once felt like second best to anybody. The Spirit of God is the one who works in something nobody marked, and it is written that the psalmist remembered in the night watches without any comment about the hour.

And use something small enough for the time available.

Twenty minutes before school is twenty minutes. Do not start something that needs an hour and then be interrupted by a bus.

You are able to fit a whole thing into the window you have, and something sized to twenty minutes has never once been a compromised version of anything. It is written in Psalm 63 that the shadow of His wings was where the rejoicing happened, and the Spirit of God is the one at work in a kitchen with the light still low outside.