From the Rising of the Sun, Somebody Is Saying It Right Now

A friend of mine went thin for about a year and only told me at the end of it.

He was not in crisis. Nothing had happened. He described it as the praying getting shorter and then getting rarer and then becoming something he did while he was doing something else, and the whole slide took months and had no single day on it.

But when he finally told me, the thing he said was not about the praying. He said: I think what actually did it was that I started to feel like the only one.

Not the only one in the world. He was not that dramatic. He meant that when he prayed in his kitchen at five thirty it felt like a small private hobby, the way it feels to be the last person in an office. He said: everybody else has moved on to their day and I am standing here talking to the ceiling.

I have heard that from more people than I can count. And I have noticed that the loneliness is usually first, and the thinning follows it.

The psalm makes a claim about geography

There is a line in the hundred and thirteenth psalm that people read as poetry and it is closer to a report.

From the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same the LORD's name is to be praised. (Psalm 113:3, King James Version)

Read it as a statement about the earth rather than as a nice sentiment. The sun is rising somewhere and setting somewhere else at every moment of every day. There is no hour when both of those are not happening.

So the psalm is saying that across that entire span, continuously, the name is being praised. Not that it should be. That it is.

And there is a companion line in Malachi that is even harder to soften.

For from the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same my name shall be great among the Gentiles; and in every place incense shall be offered unto my name. (Malachi 1:11)

In every place. That verse was spoken to a small discouraged religious community with a corrupt priesthood, who at that moment could reasonably have believed they were the last ones left.

You are inside a thing that has never once stopped, and the continuing of it was never resting on whether you were up to it this week, and Psalm 113 makes that a claim about the whole span of the earth rather than about anybody's diligence, and it is His Spirit who makes that arithmetic land as company rather than as trivia.

The lie that arrives before the drift

Here is what I want to name plainly, because a person cannot fight a thing they have not seen.

Almost nobody stops praying because they stopped believing. What happens first is that they start feeling like the last one, and the feeling of being the last one is exhausting in a way that unbelief is not. Unbelief at least has company. Being the only faithful person in a room is a job, and it is a job nobody can do for long.

There is a man in Scripture who said it out loud, and it is worth seeing what God did with it.

Elijah, under the tree, at the end of everything, tells God twice that he alone is left. And God does not argue with his feelings and does not lecture him. He feeds him twice, lets him sleep, and then corrects the arithmetic.

Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal. (1 Kings 19:18)

Seven thousand. The prophet's count was off by seven thousand, and he was not being dishonest, and he was not being weak. He simply could not see them from where he was sitting.

You have been miscounting, and the miscount was never a character flaw, it was a line of sight problem, which is exactly what 1 Kings 19 says about the seven thousand, and the Holy Spirit is the one who widens what a discouraged person can see from under a tree.

Why this is not a motivational thought

I want to be careful, because there is a cheap version of this and it does not help anybody.

The cheap version says nobody is alone as a warm feeling, and warm feelings evaporate by Tuesday. That is not what the psalm is doing. The psalm is making a factual claim about the surface of the earth, and a fact keeps working when the feeling stops.

At the hour you are reading this, it is early morning somewhere. Somebody is up before their household in a language you have never heard, saying His name. It is late evening somewhere else and somebody is saying it over a sleeping child. That is not encouragement. That is the time zones plus Psalm 113.

You have company in this hour whether or not you can feel it, and the company is a fact about the world rather than a fact about your mood, and Malachi 1 says it will be great in every place, and the Spirit is the one who joins a small kitchen to a very large room.

And the end of the book puts a number on what all of this has been building toward.

After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne. (Revelation 7:9)

Which no man could number. That is the eventual size of the room that has been around a person in every kitchen at every hour.

You have a place in that multitude already, and the place was settled by Him rather than by the strength of your week, and Revelation 7 describes the gathering as one nobody could count, and the Spirit is the one who has been sealing people into it the whole time.