Dreading It Before It Comes

Nine o'clock. Everything is done. There is nothing further required of him tonight by anybody, and this is the good hour, and it has been the good hour for years.

And at about five past he starts on tomorrow.

Not planning. Planning would be useful and would take four minutes. This is the other thing. It is running the difficult part of Thursday, in advance, in some detail, including two conversations that have not happened and one of which will not happen.

He has been doing it since about March, which is when the situation at work changed, and he is aware it is happening and has told his wife about it and she was kind about it and it made no difference at all.

Here is the arithmetic that got him. He worked it out one night, roughly, and then wished he had not. Since March, he has spent somewhere in the region of ninety hours of evenings on days that had not happened yet. Ninety hours. Out of the part of his life he actually gets to keep.

And the days themselves are mostly fine. That is the part that would be funny if it were happening to somebody else. Thursday arrives and it is hard and it is nothing like the version he ran on Wednesday night, and he handles it, and at nine o'clock he starts on Friday.

He is forty three.

What he would like, and what he could not have told you before he read that arithmetic back, is not for work to be different. Work will be what it is. He would like the hour between nine and ten to be an hour he was actually in.

You will have your own five past nine. The good hour that you spend somewhere else.

The sentence with the strange accounting in it

There is a line at the end of a stretch about anxiety that people quote as though it were a gentle suggestion, and it is more precise than that, and the precision is in the second half.

Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.Matthew 6:34

Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. Read that as a statement about supply rather than as a warning.

Jesus is saying that each day comes with an amount, and the amount is sufficient, which is a word about adequacy rather than about size. Thursday has Thursday's trouble in it and Thursday will have what is needed for Thursday's trouble.

Which means the ninety hours were not a precaution. They were a man taking Thursday's trouble and moving it into Wednesday, where the supply for it does not exist yet. That is the actual mechanism, and it is why it does not help and never has: he is carrying a load in the one place it has no provision attached.

So take it plainly: you are inside a day that came with what this day requires, and that is what Matthew 6 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the last line of a long passage and lays it down on a couch at five past nine.

And notice that Jesus does not say tomorrow will be fine. He says the opposite. Tomorrow will be anxious for itself, which is a peculiar phrase and appears to concede that tomorrow genuinely has something in it. He is not offering optimism. He is offering an allocation.

You have not been given tomorrow's supply because you are not in tomorrow, because the written word attaches the sufficiency to the day rather than to the person, and His Spirit is what makes that reach a man who has done the arithmetic and wishes he had not.

And the first clause is worth the last word here, because of who says it. Jesus, who is about to walk into the worst Friday in history, telling people not to run tomorrow in advance. That is not a man who has never had anything to dread. You have been told this by somebody who knew exactly what a Thursday can hold, and Scripture is what puts the sentence in that mouth, and His Spirit is the one who makes that the difference between advice and authority.

What this is not going to become

Now the guardrail, and it is needed, because a man like this will make a project of it by Sunday.

Nobody is telling him to stop. Instructing a person to stop doing a thing they have been doing involuntarily since March is not help, it is a new way to fail at nine o'clock. If he runs Thursday tomorrow night, nothing has gone wrong.

And nobody is telling him what Thursday holds, or that it will go better than the version, or that the situation at work resolves. Scripture does not say and I am not going to.

And nobody is telling him that the ninety hours were producing something in him. They were not. This site does not turn a habit into a curriculum.

And nothing is accruing anywhere. There is no account. The crown in this book is placed on a head by somebody else and thrown down, and nobody in that scene is being paid for evenings spent well.

You are held by a regard that has nothing to do with how you spent the hour between nine and ten, because the written word puts our standing on Christ rather than on our record, and His Spirit is what makes that a floor rather than a phrase. You have nothing ahead of you to earn, and Scripture is what settles that, and His Spirit is what keeps a good hour from becoming an assignment.