Trying to Pay Him Back

It started when he was twenty six, in a hospital corridor, and what happened there is his to tell and not mine, and the short version is that something he was certain he was going to lose was not lost.

He walked out of that building and made a decision that he has kept, in some form, for thirty years, and the decision was that he would spend the rest of his life saying thank you properly.

That has been an extraordinary life. He would not put it that way. But the number of people who have been carried by that man since he was twenty six is not small, and a great deal of it has been done at real cost and almost none of it has been visible.

So this is not an article about a man doing something wrong. Hold onto that, because what comes next could be misread.

At fifty six, in the last couple of years, something has started happening that he does not have a name for. It is a tiredness that is not physical. It arrives most often after he has done something good, which is the part that makes it confusing, and it feels closest to the sensation of paying a bill and knowing the bill will come again.

He tried to talk about it once with somebody he trusted and got about two sentences in and then stopped, because the sentences that were coming out sounded ungrateful and he is not ungrateful. He is the opposite of ungrateful. That is the whole trouble.

Here is the thing that would take a long time for him to admit and that he has never said in these words. He does not know what the original amount was. He has been servicing a debt for thirty years without ever being able to state the sum. And a debt with no stated sum cannot be paid off, structurally, no matter what is paid against it, which means the arrangement he entered in a corridor at twenty six is one that has no exit built into it.

You will have your own corridor. The thing you decided to spend your life saying thank you for, and the tiredness that comes after doing something good.

The question that ends the argument

At the end of Job, after thirty seven chapters of argument, God speaks, and He mostly asks questions rather than giving answers. And in the middle of them there is one that lands directly on a man in a corridor.

Who has first given to me, that I should repay him? Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine.Job 41:11

Read it as a challenge rather than as a rebuke, because that is how it functions. God is asking whether anybody has ever put Him in a position of owing. And the second half explains why the answer is no: everything under heaven is already His, which means nothing anybody hands Him arrives from outside His own holdings.

So there is no mechanism by which a person becomes a creditor of God. And there is, therefore, no mechanism by which God becomes a creditor of a person, because the relationship the verse rules out runs in both directions. Debt requires two parties who can be in deficit to each other, and this passage removes the possibility on the only side that could have started it.

So take it plainly: you are outside an arrangement that was never constructed, and that is what Job 41 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a question out of a whirlwind and lays it down on a man who has been paying since he was twenty six.

Which explains the tiredness precisely, and this is the part I most want him to have. The tiredness after doing something good is not ingratitude and it is not burnout in the ordinary sense. It is what happens to a person servicing an account that cannot be closed. The exhaustion is structural rather than moral. He has been doing genuinely good work inside a frame that guarantees the work can never be enough, and the frame was his, put up in a corridor by a frightened young man, and God never issued it.

You have been carrying a frame rather than a debt, because the written word denies that God can be put in the position of owing or being owed, and His Spirit is what makes that reach a man who has stopped two sentences in every time he has tried to say it.

What the thirty years were

Now the guardrail, and it is the most important paragraph in this article.

The thirty years were not wasted, and they were not a mistake, and they were not manipulation. People were carried. The cost was real. If a man reads this and concludes that three decades of love were a misunderstanding, this article has done him harm.

What is being removed is not the work. It is the invoice pinned to the work. Take the invoice off and every single thing he did is still there, and is now the other kind of thing, which is the kind a person does because they want to rather than because it is due.

You have thirty years of real love that were never installments, and Scripture is what holds both halves, and His Spirit is what keeps the second half from swallowing the first.

And nothing about the arrangement made God distant or displeased in the meantime. A crown in Scripture is placed on a head by somebody else, every single time it appears, and in the one glimpse we get of people holding one, they take it off and throw it down. You are held by a regard that no payment ever moved, 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.