I Cannot Take the Day Off

Six years. Not one whole day.

Half days, yes, and afternoons, and an hour here and there when somebody makes him. But not one clear day from waking to sleeping with nothing on it, and he could tell you the date of the last one, which he does not like about himself.

His wife stopped raising it in the third year. She did not give up on him, she gave up on that particular conversation, which is a different thing and worse.

He is fifty-four. The work is real work and there is genuinely a lot of it and the family has eaten off it for thirty years. Everything he would tell you about why is true. It is just not the reason.

And on the two occasions there has been nothing at all to do, he found something. Both times. Once in a shed and once with a truck that did not need it.

What matters here is that he is not in doubt about God. Whatever needed settling was settled six years ago, in the bad year, and it was real and it has never come loose. If you asked him he would tell you plainly that he is forgiven, and he would be right.

And he works like a man doing time.

Because underneath six years of no clear days, never stated, never examined, there is a term being served. Not for anything in particular. Not with a length on it, and that is exactly the trouble with it, because a sentence with no length runs until somebody tells you it is over, and nobody ever has.

Maybe you cannot stop either. It may not be work. It may be that you cannot be in a room doing nothing, or that a spare hour has to be filled inside a minute. And you are not in doubt about being forgiven, and the whole shape of your week is a man serving something out.

Sit down at this table with your hands empty. That is deliberate.

Probation is a legal condition and it ended

Let me set it out as the legal matter it is, because it is not a mood and it will not be settled as one.

Probation means the sentence stands, suspended, and conduct is being observed, and the observing is what holds the suspension in place. A man on probation is not free. He is out on terms, and he knows the terms even when nobody has written them down.

Six years without a clear day is a man meeting terms. Nobody set them and nobody reviews them, and that is precisely why they have never been met.

And it ended. Not is ending. Ended, in the bad year, at a point, and nobody has been observing your conduct since.

And He said, My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.Exodus 33:14

Read who is doing the giving in that sentence and read what it costs the man being spoken to. Nothing at all. He asked for the presence and was given the rest with it, unrequested, as part of the same answer.

You were given rest as part of a promise you did not negotiate, and Exodus 33 is where God attaches it to His own presence rather than to a schedule, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old promise land on a man with a boat and a list.

You were brought out and not released on license, and Deuteronomy 5 says remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and the Lord your God brought you out, therefore the Lord commanded you to keep the Sabbath, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a man that a day off was given as a memorial of being freed and never as a term of it.

Your work was never contemptible

Now something said carefully, because a paragraph like that could be turned into a way of making thirty years of work look like a mistake, and it is not a mistake.

The family ate. That is a plain fact and it covered three decades and two of your children came out of it able to do things you could not do at their age. There is a boat that is still going because of hands that did not stop, and there are people on that harbor who have been carried through hard winters by somebody who was up before them.

The work was good. Most of it will stay, and it should.

What is being taken out is not the working. It is what the six years without a day have been for.

You were never working anything off, and Isaiah 43 says I am He who blots out your transgressions for My own sake and I will not remember your sins, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can take a sentence out from under a good life's work and leave the work standing. There is no term. There has never been a term. Nobody set a length because nobody set anything.

This is not a new rule about rest

And one more, before the turn, because a man like you will already be working out how to comply.

There is no new practice here. Nobody is asking you to take one clear day a week from now on, or to institute a rhythm, or to keep a discipline of stopping that becomes another thing to be consistent about. A man like you would be excellent at that inside a month, and it would be the same term with a scheduled break in it.

One thing, once. That is all any of this is.

You are already out and there is nothing to institute, and Exodus 33 says My presence will go with you and I will give you rest, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a gift from becoming a requirement in the hands of a man who is good at requirements.