The Joy Ahead Has A Face

Twenty to eight, and the day staff come in with their coats still on and a to go coffee each, and somebody says it is freezing out there, and somebody else laughs at something in the hall. The kettle goes on. And you pull the log book round on the counter and write the same three lines you have written for years, in the same order, with the pen on the string that never quite works first time.

Settled at two. Up at four. Breakfast at seven.

Nobody reads it. You know that the way you know the noises of that house at night. It gets signed, it gets filed, and once a year somebody flicks through it for an inspection and puts it back. Three lines a night, for years, in a book that exists so that nothing important is lost, and the important thing was never the three lines. It was the hour at four in the morning that the three lines cannot hold.

You hand over. You get your coat. And on the way out you already know exactly what tomorrow is, because tomorrow is this again: the same shift, the same room, the same nobody watching. It is not that you mind. It is that you have started to wonder, quietly, whether a life can go on being poured into a place where nothing of it is ever recorded, and whether at the end of it there will be anyone at all who knows what it took.

Someone read the four o'clock

Start here, because everything else stands on it. You are seen, and you were seen while it was happening. Not watched, not audited, seen, the way a person is seen by someone who loves them and is glad they are there. That is not a kind thought I am adding to your morning; it is what is written, and the Spirit who breathed it is the one carrying it to you now over a cold mug and an open book.

The three lines were never the record. God's regard is the record, and it has more in it than the log ever could. He was in the room at four. Not informed about it afterwards. In it, while you were kneeling by a bed in the dark saying something soft that nobody else in the world will ever hear.

I know how that can land when you are this tired. It can sound like a consolation prize handed to someone who did not get the real thing. So let me be careful, because there is a way of talking about what is ahead that quietly makes today's exhaustion sound smaller than it is, and I am not going to do that. You are tired, and you were tired for good reason. It is heavy. It has gone on a long time, and nothing written here shrinks any of that. Scripture never once asks a person to call a heavy thing light, and the Spirit does not comfort people by making their week sound smaller than it was.

But look at what Scripture actually says is ahead, and look at the strange sentence it uses about Jesus.

Looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.Hebrews 12:2

For the joy that was set before Him. Now think about what that joy was. It was not a prize. It was not a position; He already had the highest one and put it down. The joy set before Jesus was people. Getting to us. The whole endurance runs on a Person wanting other persons, and that is what is in front of Him the entire time.

The joy ahead is not a thing, it is a Him

Which changes what is waiting at the end of a hidden life.

You have been half expecting a reckoning, some final accounting where the unseen years are read out and somebody says the number. That is not what is ahead of you. Hebrews 12 puts a Person there and never a total, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a relief rather than a technicality. What is ahead of you is Him, and He is not a prize you have been working toward. He is a Person you already know, who has been in the room the whole time, and the word never once describes Him as a payment. Grace is not a wage paid late, and the Spirit does not run a scoreboard.

And because the joy ahead is Him, it is not only ahead. That is the part I most want you to have. A prize can only be in the future. A Person can be in the future and also standing at the sink beside you at four in the morning, and He is. You are honored now, in the present tense, in the hallway of that house, with nobody watching and nothing written down. Nothing about tomorrow adds to it and nothing about tomorrow can take it away, because what is written is that Christ Himself is your life, and the Spirit is the one who makes that real to a tired person at twenty to eight.

I am not telling you what you will be given. Nothing written anywhere puts that in my hands, and the Spirit has never needed me to fill in a blank God left closed. I am telling you who is already here.

And if what you are carrying is more than one person can carry, and there are nights when you are doing the work of three people on your own, please say so out loud to someone who can actually change it: the manager, the home health nurse, the social worker, your own doctor. Ask about respite, which the people who most need it are reliably the last to say out loud. And if the nights have begun to go somewhere heavier than tiredness, or the thought of not being here has started to feel restful, dial or text 988 in the United States, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and talk to a person tonight. Asking for help is not a failure of faithfulness. It is how God has always sent it, through people who turn up.