Reasons to Get Up Tommorrow Morning
Overcoming the Despair of Another Day
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The late Frederick Buechner, a companion of mine for many years, once wrote, "The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."¹ I have carried that sentence around with me like a stone in my pocket, turning it over and over, wearing it smooth. But there is another sentence of his I have carried even longer, and it is this: "Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid."² Beautiful and terrible things. Both. Not one or the other. That is what has always struck me about Buechner's way of seeing. He never pretended the terrible things were not terrible. He had buried his father, a suicide, when he was ten. He knew what the dark looked like from the inside. But he also never pretended the terrible things were the truest things. He believed, with a kind of stubborn, hard-won trust, that the truest thing in the world was the grace of God, and that this grace was not an abstraction floating somewhere above the mess of our lives but was loose in the world, hiding in the ordinary, waiting to ambush us with joy when we least expected it. I believe that too. Most days. Some days, I believe it the way I believe in gravity: it holds me whether I am thinking about it or not. Other days, I believe it the way I believe in a rumor: someone told me it was true, and I am choosing to go on as if it is, because the alternative is to sit in the dark, and I have spent enough time there to know it is not a place I want to live. The chapters that follow are arranged in four movements, and I use that word deliberately, the way a musician would. This is not a straight line from despair to joy. I do not trust straight lines. Life does not move in straight lines, and any book that pretends it does is selling something. Life moves in spirals. It circles back. You think you have left a certain sadness behind, and then one morning you smell something, hear something, or a shadow falls at a particular angle, and there it is again, sitting on the porch steps as if it never left. But here is what the spiral also means: you are not in the same place you were before. You have moved. You have been changed by the journey, even the parts you would not wish on anyone.
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About the Book
I am a person of faith, but I am not writing this book only for people of faith. I am writing it for anyone who has ever opened their eyes in the morning and wondered whether there was a reason to keep them open. If you pray, I think you will find a friend in these pages. If you have given up on prayer, never started, or suspect the whole enterprise is a conversation with an empty room, I think you will find a friend here too. The question this book asks is not, finally, a religious question. It is a human question. It is the most human question there is: Is it worth it? Is any of it worth it? Is there anything on the other side of this night worth getting up for? My answer is yes. But I do not want to give you my answer. I want to give you yours. Or, more precisely, I want to help you find it. It may be in a place you have not thought to look, which is almost certainly where it is, because that is how these things work. The treasure is buried in the field, the coin is lost under the furniture, and the sheep is in the ravine where nobody thought to search. The reasons to get up tomorrow morning are, I suspect, already somewhere in your life, hiding in plain sight, waiting for you to trip over them. So here is what I propose. Let us walk together for a while. I will tell you what I have seen, and you can decide for yourself whether any of it is true. I will not raise my voice. I will not wag my finger. I will try to be honest about the times I have failed to get up, gotten up for the wrong reasons, or gotten up and wished I hadn’t. And maybe, somewhere along the way, in the space between my words and your reading of them, something will stir. Not a feeling, exactly. Something more like a recognition. Something more like the moment just before dawn, when the darkness is still the darkness but is no longer quite as sure of itself. That is all I am after. That small, stubborn crack in the dark. - The Author
About the Author
Stephen White is a former pastor, Christian school superintendent, and vice president of a leading Christian urban ministry. With decades of experience working alongside hurting and broken people and building ministries rooted in compassion and justice, White writes with the heart of a shepherd and the insight of a seasoned leader and teacher. His writings invite readers to experience God’s grace, presence, and compassion more deeply. He and his wife, Dawn, feel very grateful to be the parents of six adult children and grandparents to ten grandchildren. White is the author of several books, including Throwing the Baby Out with the Holy Water, Discipling Your Grandchildren: Leaving a Lasting Legacy, Misplaced Glory: Breaking the Spell of Pastor Worship in the Modern Church, Tired of Saying I’m Fine: The Gospel for the Not Okay, and Show Up, Shut Up, and Listen: A Compassion Primer.