Rising Up Early and Sitting Up Late, and the Verse Is Not Praising It

I asked a man on our island once what he prayed for, and he gave me a list, and the list did not have him in it anywhere.

His wife. His son's schooling. His mother. A neighbor with a bad diagnosis. The church. Two people he had fallen out with.

And I said, what about your back. Because I knew about his back. Everybody knew about his back, and everybody knew that his back was the reason there was food on that table, because he was the one who went out and there was nobody else to go.

He looked at me like I had asked him something in another language. And then he said: it is just my back. It is not a prayer.

I have thought about that answer for a long time, and I have heard versions of it from carers, from nurses, from single mothers, from men in their sixties still doing physical work because the work does not stop. The pattern is exactly the same in all of them. They will pray about everything in the household except the equipment the household runs on, which is their own body.

The psalm names the hours and does not admire them

There is a verse people quote about sleep, and almost nobody reads the first half of it.

It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep. (Psalm 127:2, King James Version)

Rise up early. Sit up late. The bread of sorrows.

That is a description of long hours in a way that does not compliment them. Scripture is not praising the work ethic in that line and it is not shaming anybody either. It is describing what people do when everything rests on them, and it calls the food that comes from it the bread of sorrows, which is a phrase nobody would invent about a good day.

You have been seen doing this, and the hours were noticed and written down long before anybody else in your house noticed them, and Psalm 127 names the early and the late in the same verse. That work is the Spirit's, and He makes an old line about long hours land on somebody who is living them.

And I want to be careful with the second half of the verse. It does not promise that a person who prays will stop working long hours. It says something about who gives the rest, and it is offered as a comfort rather than as an instruction to work less, which for a great many people is not available.

Nobody taught us that a body is a legitimate subject

Here is the thing I have watched, and it is not a lack of faith. It is a category error that was taught by accident.

We learn to pray about souls and about relationships and about circumstances. We learn that the spiritual things are the proper subject. And a body, which is the most physical thing a person owns, ends up filed under complaints rather than under prayer.

Scripture does not carry that division anywhere.

For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust. (Psalm 103:14)

He knoweth our frame. That is a word about a body's construction, and it is used as the reason for His pity in that psalm rather than as an excuse He tolerates.

You have a frame He knows about, and the knowing is offered as the ground of His tenderness rather than as a limitation He puts up with (Psalm 103:14), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a person able to bring a shoulder or a back into a prayer without feeling ridiculous.

And Jesus, who could have said anything at all to a tired group of workers, said something about a body.

And he said unto them, Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while: for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat. (Mark 6:31)

No leisure so much as to eat. He noticed that. And what He said about it was about a place and a rest, which is about as physical as instruction gets.

What this is not

I need to put a fence up, because this subject attracts two bad teachings and I have seen both do damage.

The first says that if you pray about your body it will be restored. That is a promise nobody is authorized to make, and this article does not make it. A man's back may be exactly the same next year, and that will say nothing about him or about God.

The second says that being tired is a failure to trust, and that a person who was resting properly in God would not be exhausted. That is a cruelty dressed as teaching. The sweat of the face is in Genesis 3 as a description of the world we live in, not as evidence of anybody's spiritual condition.

What is on the table here is narrower and smaller and I think more useful. It is that your body is a legitimate subject to bring, and that most people reading this have never brought it.

You are not being told to expect a repair, and you are not being told that the tiredness is your fault (Genesis 3:19). The same Spirit is the one who is present with a person in a body that hurts without either explaining it or promising anything about it.

If the pain is beyond what a person should be carrying alone, that is a doctor's ground and not an article's, and going is wisdom rather than weakness.

You have permission to bring a body to God and to a physician in the same week, and Scripture puts no competition between the two (Psalm 103:14), and it is the Spirit who removes the shame that keeps a working person from doing either one.