A Week With No Margin In It

The calendar is on the wall by the kitchen door because that is the only place everybody walks past, and it is written on in four colors.

Blue is work. Green is the boys. Red is the two hospital appointments for his father in law, one of which he is driving to and one of which he is not, which took a fortnight of quiet negotiation with his wife. Black is everything else, and everything else is mostly a car that needs a part and a bathroom tap that has been dripping since June.

It is a good life. He would say that and mean it. Nothing on that calendar is a tragedy.

On Tuesday a message came round the group. A family, three streets over, in a bad patch, and could anybody help with a couple of practical things this week.

He read it standing in the hall by the calendar. And here is the part he has not been able to shake since: nothing happened in him. Not reluctance. Not guilt. Not the internal argument he would have expected, where he weighs it up and feels bad and decides. There was simply nothing there at all. He read it the way you read a weather forecast for another country.

Then he put the phone in his pocket and went and looked at the tap.

And on Wednesday morning, shaving, he suddenly understood what had frightened him, and it was not that he had not helped. It was that there had been no one home to ask.

You know that hallway. Yours may be a rota. It may be three jobs, or one job and a person you look after, or a small business that eats everything. It may be that all of it is genuinely good and necessary and yours to do. But there is no give in it anywhere, and one day something came past that would once have moved you, and you found that it did not, and you have been quietly uneasy ever since.

Come and sit at the table. Leave the tap. I want to say something about margin, and it is not going to add a single item to that calendar.

There is no code, and there is a corner left uncut

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over the door of this site promises a secret and I am not going to hold a tired man reading in hope of one.

There is no code. There is no arrangement of Scripture that makes a week hold more or an account behave. And I will say the second thing straight after it, as a pastor: nothing in this message is asking you to do more. If you finish this and add a commitment out of guilt, I have failed you, and you will drop it in a fortnight and feel worse than you do now.

Paul was saying goodbye to a group of elders on a beach, men who had worked and led and given until it showed on them, and he left them with this.

I have shewed you all things, how that so labouring ye ought to support the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive.Acts 20:35

He does not lay a load on them. He hands them a memory. Remember the words of the Lord Jesus. And the words he picks are not about amounts or duties, they are about where the blessing sits, and they assume a man with something in his hands that he could let go of.

That is exactly what you do not have at the moment. Not because you are selfish, but because every single thing in your hands already has a name on it, and a man who is holding nothing loose has nothing he can let go of, however willing he is.

You were never asked to allocate the whole of your life to the last hour, and one edge of it was never yours to count. That is not a sentiment I am offering a man at a kitchen table. It stands behind the written harvest law, where God tells a farmer to stop cutting before the corner, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a boundary drawn round a barley field and lays it across a calendar in four colors.

You have a God who does the measuring, and He has never once handed you the job of holding it all together. Scripture says it is He who works in you both to will and to do, and His Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lets a man's shoulders come down half an inch.

Now let me say the true thing, because I have sat with a lot of men in your position and this is where it goes.

The numbness in the hallway was not a moral failure. It was a reading on a gauge. When there is no slack anywhere, a person stops being able to be moved, because being moved is expensive and the body knows there is nothing to spend. So it turns that faculty off, quietly, without telling you. And then one Tuesday you find out it is off, and you conclude something dreadful about your own heart, and that conclusion is the most damaging thing in this entire week.

You are not becoming a hard man, and one unmoved moment in a hallway is not a verdict on your love. Scripture says the Lord knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, which is not an accusation, it is tenderness from a Father who has looked at your calendar, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line like that and lets a man stop prosecuting himself while he shaves.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because none of this shifts by being agreed with in a quiet kitchen. Jesus said that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what carrying on never does. So speak it out. You have the standing to tell a hardness in your own house what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that your position rather than your performance, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word much further than a kitchen door.