The Monday After Friday

Thirty one years, and the badge went into a drawer at ten past four on the Friday, and it is in that drawer now, in the hall, third one down, under the tape and the spare keys.

The leaving do was fine. Slightly too long, entirely well meant, a card with about sixty signatures on it, a speech by somebody who had known him for four of the thirty one years and who did a decent job with the material available.

Saturday was ordinary. Sunday was good, actually, because his daughter came.

Monday.

He was awake at twenty to six, which is when he has been awake for thirty one years, and he lay there for a while and then got up because lying there was not working. And by seven he had eaten and read what there was to read and everything he could think of doing was a thing that would take eleven minutes.

By half past nine he had walked into town, which took nineteen minutes, and had bought two things he did not need in order to have a reason to be in the shops, and had understood while paying for the second one exactly what he was doing.

Here is the thing he could not have predicted, and it is not loneliness, and it is not boredom.

It is that when he thinks the sentence I am, there is nothing that arrives after it any more. For thirty one years the thing that arrived was his job, instantly, without him choosing it. He did not think of himself primarily as that, and would have said so, and would have been wrong, and now he knows he would have been wrong because the slot is empty and he can see the shape of what used to fill it.

He is sixty three. There is a lot of life left, statistically, and he knows that, and being told it is not useful.

You will have your own first Monday. The hour in which the automatic answer to the question of who you are stops arriving.

The verse that takes the whole subject away

There is a sentence in Titus that is almost brutal in how completely it removes the thing a man in that hallway is reaching for.

He saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy.Titus 3:5

Notice what kind of works Paul rules out. Not bad works. Not sloppy ones. Works done by us in righteousness, which is to say the good ones, the ones anybody would put on a card with sixty signatures.

He takes the best possible version of a person's record and says that is not the basis. It is a total exclusion, and it is deliberately total, because a partial exclusion would leave a man calculating where the line falls.

So take it plainly: you are held on a basis your thirty one years never touched, and that is what Titus 3 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line written to a young minister on Crete and lays it down in a hallway beside a drawer with a badge in it.

Now, why that is good news at half past nine on a Monday rather than merely doctrinally true.

The empty slot after I am is frightening because he assumes the slot was the load-bearing part. But Titus describes a person whose standing was never resting there at all. Which means the slot going empty is not a structural failure. Nothing has collapsed. A thing that was never carrying weight has stopped being present, and the house is still standing, and the reason he cannot feel that yet is that he has never had occasion to test which part was holding.

You have been held by mercy rather than by an occupation, and you were held by it for all thirty one years, because the written word puts the ground in God's mercy rather than in righteous works, and His Spirit is what makes that something a man can put his weight on rather than something he agrees with.

Nothing is owed and nothing was wasted

Now, two guardrails, and they are both necessary here.

The first: the thirty one years are not a bill. Nothing about a long and decent career puts God under any obligation, and if the retirement is difficult that is not a shortfall in what was earned. There is no account. A crown in Scripture is placed on a head by somebody else, always, and in the one glimpse we get of people holding one, they take it off and throw it down.

The second, and it is the one that matters more here: the thirty one years were not wasted either. That is a different claim and both are true at once. Titus removes works from the ground of our standing; he does not remove them from the world. The things a man did for thirty one years happened, and mattered to people, and are not retroactively emptied by not being the basis of anything.

If a man leaves this article thinking his career was a mistake he is now free of, then it has done harm. You have thirty one real years that were never a wage, and Scripture is what holds both halves of that, and His Spirit is what keeps the second half from being swallowed by the first.

You are held by a regard that did not move at ten past four on Friday, because the written word puts our standing on Christ rather than on a role, and His Spirit is what makes that a floor rather than a phrase.

It is worth saying what that does to the shops at half past nine, because the practical relief is specific. A man buying two things he does not need is trying to generate a reason to be somewhere, and the reason he is trying is that he believes a person needs one. Titus says the basis is mercy, which is a reason he did not generate and cannot lose, and which was in force at twenty to six this morning while he was lying there deciding whether to get up. You have had a reason to be here since before the alarm did not go off, and Scripture is what supplies it rather than a diary, and His Spirit is the one who makes an unearned reason feel like a real one.