Two Weeks With Nothing to Do

The doctor said two weeks, and wrote it down, and she took the piece of paper and thanked him in a way she thought about afterwards, because she had thanked him the way you thank somebody for a favor rather than for a diagnosis.

Nothing dramatic. A run of months that had gone on longer than a run of months should, and a body that had started making its position clear in ways that could no longer be argued with.

Day one she cleaned the house. All of it, including the cupboard under the stairs, which is a thing she has been meaning to do since March.

Day two she did the things that were left, which took until about two, and then she sat down.

And that is where the article starts, because from about two o'clock on the second day she has had a problem she did not see coming and cannot solve, which is that she does not know what to do with herself and it is not boredom.

She has tried to describe it to her husband twice and both attempts came out wrong. The closest she has got is that when the doing is removed, she cannot find the thing that is supposed to be underneath it. Not that the thing is bad. That she cannot locate it at all. She goes looking and there is a sort of blank.

She is forty one. She is well liked. She has a marriage that works and two children who are mostly fine and a job she is good at and a life that from any external angle is a good life.

And on the Tuesday of the second week she stood in her own kitchen at eleven in the morning and thought, with a clarity that frightened her: I do not know who is standing here.

That is not a crisis of faith. She could tell you the doctrine. It is something more physical than that, and much more common than people admit, and the tidy way to say it is that she has been running on output for so long that she has lost the reading on anything else.

You will have your own Tuesday. The moment the doing stops and you go looking for what is underneath and cannot immediately find it.

The verse with the word not in it twice

There is a sentence in Ephesians that everybody can quote and almost nobody has stood on, and the reason is that it is much more radical than its familiarity suggests.

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.Ephesians 2:8-9

Count the negations. Not your own doing. Not a result of works. Paul says it twice, in two different ways, in one sentence, which is what a writer does when he expects to be misheard.

And notice what is being denied. Not that works are bad. Three verses later he is enthusiastic about them. What is denied is that works are the ground. He is talking about what a person is standing on, and he removes one thing from underneath and puts another there.

So take it plainly: you are standing on something that was never your output, and that is what Ephesians 2 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a first century sentence and lays it down in a kitchen at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday.

Which is exactly the diagnosis she needs, and it is more precise than a comforting word would be. She went looking under the doing and found a blank, and concluded that there was nothing there. But the verse describes a person whose ground was never the doing in the first place, which means what she found was not an absence. It was the wrong place to look. The floor is not underneath the work. The floor is somewhere else entirely, and it has been holding her up the whole time including on the days she produced nothing at all.

You have been standing on grace while checking under the works, because the written word puts the ground outside our output twice in one sentence, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a felt thing rather than a doctrinal one.

What the two weeks cannot tell her

Now, and this is the part where a great deal of well meant advice goes wrong.

Nobody here is going to tell her that the rest will restore her sense of herself. It might. It might not, and I do not know, and Scripture does not say, and I am not going to furnish that. What I can say is that the two weeks are not a test she can fail.

Because the thing she is afraid of, at eleven on a Tuesday, is that the blank is the truth and the busyness was covering it. And the verse says the ground is a gift, which means the blank cannot be the truth, because the truth is not something a person generates and therefore is not something a person can fail to find.

The crown in this book is placed on a head by somebody else. Every time it appears. And in the one glimpse we get of people who have one, they take it off and throw it down in front of the throne, which is not what anybody does with something they made.

You are held by a regard that has nothing to do with your output, and you were held by it on day two with the cupboard under the stairs finished, because Scripture puts our standing on Christ rather than on our record, and His Spirit is what makes that a floor rather than a phrase.

And it works in the other direction too, which is the half people forget. If the two weeks do nothing for her, that is not a failure either. You have nothing to achieve in these two weeks and nothing to recover, because the written word never sets rest as a task, and His Spirit is what keeps that from turning into one more thing on the list.