The Am/Pm Alarm Mishap

Some mornings I don’t walk out of the house feeling good.

Some mornings I wake up, look at my phone, and realize I set my alarm for 6 PM instead of 6 AM. Which means I didn’t set an alarm. Which means I’m now late. Which means that quiet, unhurried morning I had planned, Bible, coffee, a few minutes to think, is just gone. Completely gone. And I’m now doing a full sprint through the house trying to compress about thirty minutes of preparation into about four.

And if you’ve never done this, I don’t know what to tell you. You’re either more disciplined than me or you haven’t been humbled yet. One of those.

So I’m moving fast, I’m skipping things I shouldn’t skip, I’m making decisions I’ll regret, like thinking I can get away without steaming something when I absolutely cannot, and the whole time there’s this low hum of frustration running underneath everything. Not at anyone. Not at anything specific. Just this general irritation at the morning, at myself, at whoever invented AM and PM and made them look identical on a small screen at 11 at night.

And someone says, “Good morning, how are you?”

And I say, “Great. Glad to be here!”

That second part is true. But great? I don’t know. I am running on no coffee and worse decisions, and I’ve been in a low-grade conflict with my entire morning since my eyes popped open to no alarm and panic set in.

Here’s the thing: nobody did that to me. No one said anything wrong. No one had a bad attitude. No one sent a difficult email. It was just a morning that didn’t go the way I wanted it to go, and something in me responded like someone was threatening me.

The alarm being set for the wrong time didn’t create that. It just pulled back the curtain on something that was already there. That’s the uncomfortable truth behind James 4:1. The war outside is almost always overflow from the war inside.