WHEN THE MORNING IS HARD

A devotional for the seasons when the usual ones stop working.

Most devotional writing assumes a reader who is tired but fundamentally well - somebody who needs a lift, a verse, a reminder that God is good. That is a real reader, and there is nothing wrong with a book written for them.

This one is for the other reader.

For somebody in month fourteen of something. For somebody who has prayed about the same thing for six years without result. For somebody who has stopped singing in church and has not told anybody why. For somebody who has been comforted, repeatedly, by people who meant well, and came away feeling worse.

For that reader, the ordinary encouragements do not merely fail. They add a second problem on top of the first: the growing suspicion that everybody else is finding this easy.

WHAT THIS BOOK SAYS THAT MOST DO NOT

- That a third of the Psalms are complaints, and that one of them - Psalm 88 - ends in darkness with no resolution, and has never been edited.

- That "God will not give you more than you can handle" is a misquotation. The verse it comes from is about temptation, not suffering, and it has been doing damage for a century.

- That anger directed at God is in the text, at length, and is not rebuked. Job accuses God directly. Jeremiah says he was deceived. Habakkuk opens his book with a complaint and does not soften it.

- That at the end of Job, the friends who defended God with impeccable orthodoxy are told they got it wrong, and the man who shouted is told he spoke rightly.

- That faith is not certainty, not feeling, and not optimism about outcomes - and that what is left is much plainer and much more durable.

- That endurance does not feel like strength from the inside. It feels like barely coping, and there is no other version.

SEVENTY-TWO READINGS

Five to eight minutes each. A verse from the King James Version, a short piece, one small thing at the end, and - if you can manage more that morning - a longer note underneath.

On the silence. On three in the morning, and why what it produces is not thinking. On being told to cheer up. On the prayer that was not answered. On what happens when everybody else moves on at week eight. On the marriage under strain. On envy. On the testimony you do not have because yours has not resolved. On what you have lost that nobody counts. On hope that makes no prediction at all.

And one reading devoted entirely to the difference between spiritual darkness and clinical depression, with the practical distinctions, and the plain statement that if it is the second, this book is not the right tool and a doctor is.

WHAT IT WILL NOT DO

It will not fix anything. It will not tell you why. It will not ask you to feel better by the end.

It is not cheerful. It is intended to be accurate, on the grounds that accuracy is more use than cheerfulness to somebody who is not well.

If you have been performing wellness in the one place you most needed not to - this was written for you.