The Hour You Keep Giving Away

Saturday morning, eight until nine. That is the hour, and he decided on it two years ago, and it is a good hour.

He is not vague about what it is for. Reading, slowly, with a pen. Praying about the week that has gone rather than the one coming. That is it. He tried it for three consecutive Saturdays two years ago and by the third one he understood that this hour was going to be the most important thing in his week, and he said so, out loud, to his wife.

Here is what has happened to it since.

His brother needs a lift to the airport. A neighbor's fence comes down in the wind. Somebody at church asks him to look at the accounts, on a Saturday morning, because that is when they are free. His daughter has a match. There is a thing on at his son's school. His mother needs collecting.

Every one of those is real, and every one of those is good, and not one of them is a crisis.

He has had that hour, properly, about nine times in two years.

And every time it goes, he tells himself the same sentence, which is so reasonable that it has never once been examined: "It is only an hour, and this actually matters."

Notice what that sentence does. It puts the hour in the category of things that do not actually matter. He has been saying that to himself every week for two years and he has never heard himself say it.

He is forty nine and he is tired in a way that sleeping does not fix.

The sabbath was made for man

Jesus says a sentence about the sabbath that people quote to get out of things, and it is worth reading in the direction it was actually pointing.

And he said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.Mark 2:27

Take that where you sit. You are the direction that gift was aimed in. The word says the sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been putting that hour in front of you for two years.

Made for man. It is a gift, given in the direction of the person, for their sake.

Now here is the thing almost nobody notices. He said that to defend His disciples from people who were policing the rules. But the sentence cuts in two directions at once, and the second one is yours.

If the sabbath was made for man, then a man giving his sabbath away every week is not being generous. He is refusing a gift. And a gift refused week after week for two years does not stay neutral; it leaves a specific kind of tiredness that sleeping does not touch, which is what you have.

So take this where you sit, and know it is not my opinion, it is what is written: that hour was made for you, and you have every right to it right now, without earning it and without apologizing for it. His word says the sabbath was made for man, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been prompting you toward that hour every week for two years, which is why the loss of it keeps registering.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who built a rule of life for a movement of ordinary people, and who is normally quoted for how hard he worked. Read his diaries and something else shows up.

He kept the hours.

He rose at four for fifty years, and he was ferociously interruptible about almost everything else in his life, and he was not interruptible about that. He rode a quarter of a million miles, preached in fields and mine yards and prisons, and he had a fixed structure underneath all of it that did not move for whoever asked first.

That is not rigidity. It is the reason the man lasted fifty years at that pace when most of his contemporaries did not.

The nickname came as mockery of how methodical they were. They kept it, because it fit.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the only reason the warmth survived is that something in the week was fixed.

Nothing in your week is fixed. Everything in it is negotiable to the first person who asks, and the first person who asks is never God, because God does not compete for a slot by ringing you on a Saturday morning.