Ninety Minutes And A Full Day

The pan is on the lowest ring and the bottle is standing in it, and he is watching the water not quite move.

He has been standing here for four minutes. He knows it is four minutes because he checked the clock when he put the pan on and he has checked it twice since, and the second time he did the arithmetic he has been doing all week. Down at eleven forty. Up at one. Down at two twenty. Up at ten past three, and that one lasted, and now it is a quarter to five and the sky over the fence has gone the color of weak tea. Ninety minutes. He got ninety minutes, in pieces, and today there is a shift, and the car needs fuel, and somebody at work is going to ask him a question that requires an opinion.

Upstairs the floor creaks and stops creaking. He does not look up. He has learned not to hope at a creak.

What he is doing, standing over a pan of water that will not hurry, is running the day like a budget. He has thirty units of himself. He counts out four for the drive and eight for the morning and the rest for whatever happens at two in the afternoon when the whole thing usually falls over, and every version of the sum comes out short. It has come out short for four days. So he is not tired in the ordinary way. He is bracing. His shoulders have crept up somewhere near his ears and they have been there since Tuesday, and he could not tell you when they went, only that they are there, and that this is what he now calls being awake.

You know this kitchen. Maybe yours has a different floor and a different bottle and the baby is three weeks or eleven weeks or nine months and still not sleeping through, but you know the sum, because you have run it, this morning, before the light came. You counted what you had. You looked at what was coming. And somewhere in the counting you decided, quietly, without saying it, that today is going to be survived rather than lived.

I want to get to you before you stand up.

You have been starting from behind

Here is what has actually happened to you, and it is not that you are tired.

Tiredness is honest. Tiredness is a body telling the truth about a load, and there is no shame anywhere in it, and there is no fixing it with a sentence. What has happened on top of the tiredness is that you have taken the whole day onto your own account. You woke up as the source. Everything today has to come out of you, and you have already checked the level, and the level is low, so the day is a debt before it is a day.

That is bracing. And bracing is not the same as being ready. A braced person is holding themselves rigid against something they expect to hurt, and it costs more than the thing usually does.

So let me put a different sum in front of you.

It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22-23

Notice when the mercies arrive. Not at the end of the day, as a reward for getting through it. Not when you have proved you deserve them. They are new every morning, which means they were already new when you were standing at that pan, before you had done one single thing right, in the four minutes when you were doing nothing at all except waiting for water.

And notice who wrote it. That line does not come from a man having a good week. It comes out of the middle of the saddest book in the Bible, written by somebody sitting in the ruins of everything he loved, and he stops in the wreckage and says: this is new this morning. Not the situation. The mercy. The situation was still rubble.

That is your kitchen. The situation is still ninety minutes. Nobody here is going to tell you it was eight, and nobody is going to tell you that the right attitude turns four days into rest. The mercy is not a rewrite of the night. The mercy is the thing that was already standing in the room while the night was happening.

And I want you to see the shape of the God who hands it to you. He feeds his flock like a shepherd, gathers the lambs in his arm, and, in the same breath, gently leads those that are with young. That last clause is not an afterthought. The Shepherd sets the whole pace of the flock to the ones carrying the young. He does not shout at the back of the line to keep up. He slows the entire company down to the speed of the one with an infant against her chest.

You have been trying to keep up with a pace nobody set for you.