The Day He Spends Getting Ready

He has one day and he spends the whole of it getting ready for the other six.

Nobody would describe it that way, including him. If you asked, he would say he has a day off, and he does, and it is on the calendar, and the family plan around it.

What happens on it is this.

The paperwork that could not be done in the week. The two phone calls to people who are only in on that day. The van, or the roof, or the thing in the yard. The order for Tuesday. A conversation with his brother about the accounts that has to happen somewhere and there is nowhere else.

And then it is six in the evening and he is tired in the particular way that is not the same as having worked, and the day has gone, and Monday starts in about eleven hours.

Fourteen years since he took the business on.

Here is the thing he said to nobody, in the van, at a set of lights, about a month ago.

I do not think I have had an hour that was not spoken for since my father died.

Not an hour of nothing to do. He has had plenty of those and he sleeps fine. An hour that was not already claimed by something before it arrived.

He is not complaining. He would tell you he is fortunate and he means it and it is true.

But there is a difference between a day off and a day for getting ready, and he has been calling the second thing by the first name for fourteen years.

If your day off is for getting ready, come and sit down out here. Nobody is going to add anything to your week.

God stopped when there was nothing making Him

There is a sentence at the front of the Bible that most people read as a piece of scenery, and it is actually the ground the whole of rest stands on.

And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.Genesis 2:2

Stop on the word rested and ask the obvious question, which almost nobody asks.

Why?

He was not tired. There is no version of this in which the Almighty needed to sit down and recover. There was nothing chasing Him and nothing outstanding and no Monday coming.

He stopped because stopping was part of the making. It was not recovery from the work and it was not preparation for more work. It was a seventh thing, done on purpose, in front of everybody, by somebody with no need of it whatsoever.

You are being invited into something God did rather than into something you have earned. Genesis 2:2 grounds rest in what He Himself did on a day when nothing required it, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets that land in a man as a gift rather than as one more item, which means the hour is not waiting behind your paperwork.

Getting ready is not stopping, whatever the calendar says

Now the plain thing about that day, because it has been known since the lights and never once said out loud.

Preparation is work. It is good work, and necessary, and it keeps a business and a family upright, and nobody here is criticizing a single hour of it.

But it is not rest, and calling it rest has cost you fourteen years, because a man who believes he has a day off does not go looking for one.

The difference is not how tiring it is. The difference is whether the hour is claimed before it arrives. Everything on your day is claimed. That is what makes it the same substance as the rest of the week wearing different clothes.

You are allowed an hour that nothing has a claim on, and it is not owed to anybody. Mark 2:27 has Jesus saying the sabbath was made for man and not man for the sabbath, and it is His Spirit who lets a command land as a gift, which means the unclaimed hour is not something you have to justify to your brother, your calendar or yourself.

And I am not handing you a scheme. No system for reorganizing your day, nothing to keep up, no rule about the paperwork. That would be one more thing claimed in advance and you have a day full of those.

I am also not telling you which day, and this site never will. That question has cost more than it was worth, and no reader will fail this article by having a different answer to it.

You are not the one holding this together, and nothing collapses in the hour nothing has claimed. Colossians 1:17 says by Him all things consist, and it is His Spirit at work in the ordinary machinery of a business and a family, which means the sentence underneath every claimed hour is a fear rather than a description.

God is the one holding you, and He has been holding all of it through fourteen years of you getting ready.