The Diary With No White In It

She keeps a paper diary because she likes to see the week, and lately she has stopped liking to see the week.

Six weeks out. Not one white square. Monday is the school thing and the call with her sister. Tuesday is the delivery for the woman at the end of the road and then the meeting she runs. Wednesday she has written the word HOSPITAL in capitals and put a box around it. Thursday has two things in it and an arrow linking them because they are on opposite sides of town. Saturday morning she is doing the flowers because nobody else offered.

Every single thing in that diary is good. That is the part that undoes her. There is nothing in it she would take out. It is a life of loving people written down in blue biro, and any one of those squares would be a lovely thing to hear about somebody else doing.

Then the message comes on Sunday evening. Somebody asking, very sweetly, whether she could possibly help on a Saturday in three weeks.

And she feels it go through her like a hot wire. Not tiredness. Anger. A flat, fast, furious no, and it lasts about a second and a half, and then the guilt arrives on top of it and sits there for the rest of the evening.

She types back: of course, happy to.

Then she puts the phone face down and stands at the window with her arms folded and thinks the thing she would not say to anybody, which is: there is nothing left. Every hour I have is spoken for. If God asked me for something tomorrow I would have to look in a diary to see whether I could fit Him in.

You know that diary. Yours might be a rota, or a shift pattern, or a phone that goes off six times an evening with people who all deserve you. Yours might not even be full of good things; it might just be full. But there is no edge on your week, nowhere in it that is not assigned, and something in you has begun to go hard about being asked, and the hardness frightens you more than the tiredness ever did.

Come and sit down. Put the diary on the table where we can both see it. There is an old harvest law I want to lay across it, and it is not going to ask you for another hour.

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

Let me say the plain thing at the top, because the name over the door of this site promises a secret and I would rather you closed the tab now than read on hoping.

There is no code. There is no arrangement of Scripture that makes a week hold more or an account behave. And nothing in this article is going to tell you to give more, do more, or add anything at all to that diary. If you take one extra commitment out of this, I have written it badly.

What Scripture actually carries here is a farmer with a field, told by God to stop the harvester before the edge.

As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith.Galatians 6:10

And behind that line, the law it grew out of: leave the corners of the field standing. Do not go back for the sheaf you forgot. The whole of the field is his. He plowed it and sowed it and counted on it and every row of it is spoken for. And God does not tell him to give a portion of the harvest away. He tells him where the harvesting stops.

That is a completely different instruction, and the difference is the whole of this evening. A portion comes out of what is yours. A corner was never yours. One adds a line to the diary. The other draws a boundary around it.

You were never asked to harvest your own week to the last square, and one edge of it was never yours to count. That is not a nice idea I have arranged for a tired woman on a Sunday. It is written into the harvest law and carried into Paul's letter, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a boundary drawn round a barley field and lays it over a page of blue biro.

You have a God who made the opportunity as well as the hour, and He has never once needed you to hold the whole thing up. Scripture says it is God who works in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure, and His Spirit is the one who takes a written promise and starts unclenching an actual jaw.

Now let me say the true thing, because you deserve better than admiration.

The hot wire on Sunday night was not selfishness. It was a body telling the truth that the mouth would not. There is no slack anywhere in you, and a person with no slack cannot be generous, they can only be compliant, and compliance costs the giver everything and gives the receiver something slightly thinner than love. You have been running on that for months and calling it faithfulness.

You are not becoming a hard woman, and one second and a half of anger is not a verdict on your heart. Scripture says the Lord knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, which is not an insult, it is tenderness, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line like that and lets a body put its shoulders down.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because a full diary does not change by being resented quietly. Jesus said that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what enduring never does. So speak, out loud, in your own front room. You have the standing to tell an old habit what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that your position and not your reward, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word much further than a window and a folded pair of arms.