The Evening I Could Not Stop Working

Aaron had been looking forward to that Friday evening for about nine weeks, and when it finally arrived he spent the first two hours of it looking for something to fix.

Everything was done. That is the point of the story and it is also the part he cannot get past.

The work had gone out on Thursday. The invoices were sent and two of the three had already been paid, which never happens. The house was tidy because his wife had done it and had told him, twice, cheerfully, that it was done. There was food. There was more than food, there was the good bread from the place that closes early.

The table was laid. The candles were out. His daughter was upstairs getting changed and singing something loudly and badly.

And Aaron was in the hallway with a screwdriver.

There was a hinge. He would tell you there was a hinge, and there was, in the sense that a door in that house has been slightly loose for about a year and a half and nobody has ever once mentioned it.

He stood there taking a screw out of a hinge nobody cares about, eleven minutes before the evening was due to start, and his wife came past with a dish in her hands and did not say anything at all, and that was somehow worse.

What got him was his daughter, coming down the stairs, still singing, who stopped four steps up and looked at him with a screwdriver in his hand and said, in the entirely unbothered voice of a twelve year old: Abba. It's done. Come and sit down. Nothing is going to fall over.

It's done. Nothing is going to fall over.

Aaron stood in his own hallway holding a screwdriver and a screw and could not answer her, and he could not have explained it to any man he works with.

And the sentence that arrived, standing there, had nothing to do with the hinge.

He thought: everything is finished and provided for, and I am still holding the house up with my hands, and I have been doing it for so long that putting them down feels like letting go of a rope.

Say the word properly first

Before anything else I want to be plain about what wealth means on this site, because the word is slippery and I would rather be clear than clever with a man standing in a hallway holding a screwdriver.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a finished week, not a house with nothing loose in it. A portion is the old table word for what is set down in front of somebody because they belong at that table, and Scripture takes that ordinary word and does something astonishing with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only sense the word carries here.

And this piece is written for one particular reader, so let me be exact. It is for the man who has enough and cannot stop. If you are genuinely short, if the work is not finished and the hands are busy because they have to be, then nothing here is asking you to relax about that, and any article that did would deserve closing. Real lack is real and it deserves a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that. What I want to look at is a screwdriver eleven minutes before an evening that was already ready, and I would rather the word of God did the looking, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed.

He quieted his own soul

The hundred and thirty-first psalm is three verses long, which is almost nothing, and it contains one of the most physical pictures in the whole book.

O LORD, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me.Psalm 131:1-2

Read the verb. I have calmed and quieted my soul. He does it. It does not happen to him and nobody does it for him. It is an action taken by a man on his own insides, which means it is available on an ordinary Friday and does not require the circumstances to cooperate.

And then read the picture, because it is very carefully chosen. Not a nursing child. A weaned child. A nursing child is quiet on its mother because it is getting something. A weaned child is quiet on its mother for no reason except that she is his mother, and there is nothing being transacted, and it is the only reason he needs.

That is the difference between an evening you have earned and an evening you are simply in.

You are not a driven man who needs to be told to relax. You are somebody who has been holding a rope for a long time and has never been told he can let go of it, and the written word does not scold anybody for that. It shows a man quieting himself, on purpose, as something a person can do, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between reading that and a pair of hands actually opening.

And here is what is true of you this evening, with the hinge still loose. You have today, and the word says a soul can be quieted like a weaned child, and His Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a man in a hallway.

What the hinge is actually for

Think about what got you on those stairs. It wasn't the interruption. You'd have laughed off an interruption.

It was: it's done, nothing is going to fall over. It was a twelve year old telling you, without any idea what she was doing, that the house is not standing up because of your hands. You were starving to be told that, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as weakness, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a person and not merely about them.

That is the honest thing under the screwdriver. The hinge is not being fixed. The hinge is being used, because a man who is doing something is a man who has not yet found out what happens when he stops, and finding that out is the actual risk in that hallway.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. The house is not being held up by your hands and it never was. God did not hand you the rope. Jesus said on a cross that it is finished, which is a strange thing to say at the exact moment when, by every visible measure, nothing was, and He was in that hallway before your daughter came down.