The Week Off I Spent Bracing

Kalei booked the week in February, took it in July, and spent most of it standing at a window.

Nothing was wrong. That is not a figure of speech. He had covered his shifts. His truck had passed. The thing with his uncle's paperwork that had eaten eighteen months had finally closed in June and closed the right way. His daughter had rung on the Sunday just to talk, not to ask for anything, which is a thing he still turns over.

The week was clear. Actually clear. Seven days, nothing booked, no phone, nobody needing him.

And on the Tuesday he realized he had been standing at the window in the front room for a while, looking at the road, and that he had been doing some version of that since Sunday afternoon.

He was not bored. He would like it understood that he is not somebody who cannot be alone. He was watching. Somewhere under the ribs he was watching for the thing, because in his experience a clear week is what comes right before, and it has been that way since he was seventeen and the boat went and then the house went in the same year.

He is forty-four now. There have been long stretches since when nothing went wrong at all.

The window is still where he goes.

What got him was on the Thursday. He drove out to see an old man he checks on, and the old man, who is close to ninety and has buried more people than Kalei has met, looked at him and said, without any preamble at all: you look like a man waiting on weather. There is no weather, son. Come and sit on the step and let it be Thursday.

Let it be Thursday.

Kalei sat down on somebody else's step and looked at the ground for a while, and he could not have explained it to anybody in his family.

And the sentence that arrived, sitting there, had nothing to do with the week.

He thought: I have been standing at a window since I was seventeen, and a man of ninety just told me it is Thursday.

Let me say the word plainly first

Before we go on I want to be plain about what wealth means on this site, because the word is slippery and I would rather be understood than admired.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a cushion, not a week with nothing 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 startling 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 one who has enough and cannot rest in it. If you are actually short, if there really is something coming and the watching is telling you the truth, then nothing here is asking you to make peace with that, and any article that did would deserve to be closed. 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 clear week spent at a window, and I would rather the word of God did the looking, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed.

He makes me lie down

The twenty-third psalm has been said over so many graves that people have stopped hearing what its second line is actually describing, and the Holy Spirit has been keeping it for men at windows.

The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters.Psalm 23:1-2

He makes me lie down. Not He lets me. Not He suggests it.

Anybody who has been around animals knows why that verb is there. A sheep will not lie down while it is afraid. It will stand in the best grass in the country, with its legs locked, watching a treeline, and it will not eat and it will not rest, and no amount of grass will change that. The only thing that changes it is a shepherd the sheep has decided is actually watching the treeline.

That is the whole psalm in one line. Rest is not produced by the pasture. Rest is produced by a Person, and it arrives in a body as a decision to stop watching, because somebody else is.

You are not a man who cannot relax. You are somebody who learned at seventeen that clear weather is the front edge of something, and no clear week since has been able to talk him out of it. The written word does not scold anybody for that, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between agreeing with a psalm and a man's legs actually unlocking.

And here is what is true this evening, before you know anything about the next year: you have today. The word says the Lord is my shepherd and I shall not want, present tense, and His Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a body that has been standing.

What the window is actually for

Think about what got you on that step. It wasn't the advice. You'd have argued with advice.

It was: there is no weather, son. Let it be Thursday. It was somebody older than the fear telling you what day it actually was. You were starving to be told the treeline is covered, 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 watching. The window is not being asked for information. It is being asked to give you enough warning next time, and no window can do that, which is exactly why a clear week made it worse rather than better.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. You were never given the treeline. God did not put you on watch over the weather. Jesus slept in the back of a boat in a storm bad enough to frighten men who had fished that water their whole lives, and He was at that window on Tuesday before the road was even empty.