The Day Off I Could Not Sit Down On

She had the whole Saturday. Both shifts covered, nothing owed to anybody, nobody needing collecting, the first genuinely free day since some time in the spring.

She was awake at ten past five.

By seven the washing was on and the bathroom was done. By nine she had bleached a doorframe. At about half eleven she made herself a cup of tea, sat down in the armchair with it, and got up again forty seconds later to do something with a drawer, and the tea went cold on the arm.

That happened four more times before three in the afternoon. Four separate cups.

She noticed on about the third one, and she stood in her own front room and said out loud, to nobody, what is wrong with you.

Nothing is wrong with her. Here is the thing she has not had time to work out, because working it out would require sitting down. She has been running two jobs for fourteen months, and running them well, and the way she has managed it is by never stopping, because stopping is where it hurts. Sitting down is where you feel your back. Sitting down is where the tiredness catches up and where the arithmetic of the month gets a chance to speak.

So her body has learned, extremely efficiently, that sitting is dangerous. Not restful. Dangerous.

And on the one Saturday when there was nothing to run from, it turned out there was nothing to run to either, and she spent eleven hours moving around a small flat cleaning things that were already clean.

You know that armchair. Yours might be a Sunday afternoon, or a fortnight's leave you filled with jobs, or the way a quiet evening makes you restless. You are not lazy, and nobody has ever accused you of it, and the thing that frightens you is not work.

Come in and sit down here with me, and I will get it, and you are not getting up. There is a detail in the manna account about what time of day it stopped, and it is the whole of what I have got for you.

There is no code, and there is a morning

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 keep a woman on two jobs reading in hope of one.

There is no code. There is nothing in Scripture that pays a bill, and nothing here is a technique. And I will say the other thing straight out, because women in your position get preached at very badly: nothing in this article is telling you to work less, and nothing in it says the second job is a failure of faith. You are covering a household. I am not going to insult that.

Here is the detail. In the desert, food came every morning, and this is the sentence that follows.

And they gathered it every morning, every man according to his eating: and when the sun waxed hot, it melted.Exodus 16:21

Read the second half of that. When the sun waxed hot, it melted.

So there was a window. The gathering had a start and it had a finish, and the finish was not negotiable, and it was quite early. By the middle of the morning there was nothing left on the ground to gather, and every person in that camp had a whole day in front of them in which gathering was not possible.

God built a stop into the arrangement. Not a suggestion. A physical stop, every single day, for forty years.

Because a nation of former slaves would otherwise have gathered all day. That is what slavery teaches a body. There is no natural stop in a person who has been taught that stopping is when the bad thing happens, so He put the stop in the world instead, and He put it in early.

You were never designed to gather all day, and God put a finish line into the daily supply on purpose. That is not a comfort I have arranged in your front room. It is written into Exodus 16, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an old detail about the heat of the sun and lays it on a woman with four cold cups of tea.

You have today, and today is met, and the gathering for it has a finish. Scripture says when the sun waxed hot it melted, and His Spirit is the one who makes an ancient stopping point land in a body that has not had one in fourteen months.

Now let me say the real thing, because you asked what is wrong with you out loud in your own front room and you deserve a proper answer.

Nothing is wrong with you. What you have is a body that has correctly learned a rule. The rule is: while you are moving, the whole of it is manageable. Sit down and it arrives, all of it, the tiredness and the back and the month.

That is not a character flaw. That is an accurate observation about your life, and your body is protecting you from something real.

And here is the cost nobody counts. A body that cannot sit does not get repaired, and the reason you are running two jobs is a household, and a household eventually needs the woman as much as it needs the shifts.

You are not failing at rest, and a body that has learned not to stop was learning something true. Scripture says come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest, and He says it to people who are working rather than to people who are idle, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and makes it an invitation rather than a rebuke.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because fourteen months does not come off a body because somebody was kind to you on a Saturday. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what pushing through never does. So speak, out loud, in this room, sitting down. You have the standing to speak to a fear in your own house and tell it what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that yours by position rather than by output, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word much further than a small flat.