The Light Comes In For An Hour

It arrives at about half past three.

A band of light comes along the top of the wall opposite, works its way down and across, and by half past four it has gone off the edge of the table and out.

An hour. That is what this room gets.

And you have not put anything in it, because an hour is not a window. An hour is a rumor of a window. Everything you have ever read about this assumes a place where light is a condition of the room rather than an event that happens once a day.

So you have written the room off, and the room is where you live.

Let me put one thing down before the practical part, and it is worth more than the practical part.

An hour of real light is not nothing. It is an hour.

The darkness and the light are both alike

David writes a line in Psalm one hundred and thirty nine about dark places, and the claim in it is larger than most people notice.

Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee. (Psalm 139:12, King James Version)

The darkness and the light are both alike to thee.

You are living in a room that God does not grade, and no low corner of any building has ever once been outside what He sees perfectly well. Psalm 139:12 says the darkness and the light are both alike to thee, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says that over a man in a lower floor room at half past three.

Understand what that verse is doing, because it is not a sentiment about hard times.

It is a statement about God's relationship to the actual physical dark. The night shineth as the day. Not: God helps you through the dark. The dark does not function as dark where He is concerned.

So a dim room is not a place He has less access to, and a person in one is not further away from anything.

You were never further off for living in a lower room, and the amount of light in your home has never once altered the distance between you and God. The Spirit of God is what makes that reach a man rather than just read well, and Psalm 139 is where the night shining as the day is written down.

An hour is a real amount

Now the practical half, and there is a fact here you may not know.

Plants do not run continuously. They run while there is light and store what they make, and a short strong period is genuinely usable.

An hour of direct light in the late afternoon is a real amount. It is more, in terms of what actually reaches a leaf, than a whole day of what most people call bright shade in a north room. Direct beats diffuse by a lot, and one hour of direct is not the poor relation of eight hours of dim.

So your room is not the worst case. It has a low total and a genuine peak, and a peak is the part that counts.

You are living somewhere with a real peak in it, and a low daily total has never once been the number that settles what will grow. The written word in Psalm 139:12 will not rank the dark against the light, and the Holy Spirit is the one who stops a man ranking his own room.

You have an hour that does real work, and the smallness of a number has never once told you what that number is capable of. What is written in Psalm 139:12 refuses to rank the dark and the light, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a verdict off a room.

And here is the part that makes it usable, and it is the whole practical content of this article.

The hour moves. It is a band that travels down the wall and across, and it is not in the same place at half past three as it is at four.

Which means putting a plant in the middle of the room, or on a shelf, or on the sill, may mean it gets none of that hour at all. The hour has a location and it is not necessarily where you would guess.

You are able to find that hour with your own eyes in a single afternoon, and one afternoon of watching has never once been time spent badly. The Spirit of God is the one who makes an ordinary observation useful, and Psalm 139 is the ground under a room that is not written off.

Find the band

So here is the instruction, and it takes one afternoon and then about ten seconds a week forever.

Be in the room at half past three. Watch where the band of light actually lands. Follow it for ten minutes.

Then put the pot in the middle of where it goes. Not near it. In it.

It may be a strange place. It may be the arm of a chair, the end of a bookshelf, the floor. That is fine. A plant in an odd spot that gets the hour beats a plant in a sensible spot that gets nothing. Then leave it there and water it when it is dry.

You are permitted to put it somewhere that looks wrong, and an odd place with light in it has never once been worse than a tidy place without. Psalm 139:12 says the night shineth as the day, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man choose light over appearances.

You are giving a plant the whole of what that room actually has, and putting something in an odd place has never once been the wrong call when the light is there. Psalm 139:12 says the night shineth as the day, and the Holy Spirit is the one who stands in a room at half past three with a man watching a wall.