The Hour She Gave Away Again

It was in the diary. That is the part that gets her.

Thursday, two till three. Written in, in pen, the week before, after a conversation with somebody who had told her, quite firmly, that she needed to start protecting some time.

She had liked that phrase. Protecting some time. She had said it to two other people that week.

On the Wednesday her sister rang about something that was not urgent and could have been Friday, and she said of course, and moved it, and did not think about it at the time.

That is the eleventh time.

She knows it is the eleventh because after the seventh she started counting, quietly, in the back of the same diary, which is a thing she would be mortified for anybody to find.

Here is what she has begun to suspect and has not said out loud.

She is not failing to protect the hour. She is not that disorganized and she protects other people's time ferociously.

She is giving it away because she does not actually believe she is allowed to have it. And so when anybody asks, there is nothing in her that puts up a hand, because you cannot defend a thing you do not think is yours.

If your hour keeps going, come and sit down out here. Nobody is going to give you a system for protecting it.

The promise is left standing open, and that is the word used

There is a sentence in Hebrews with an odd verb in it, and the verb is doing the work.

There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God.Hebrews 4:9

Remains. Not is offered, not is available on application, not may be earned. Remains, which is what you say about something that is still there after everything else has moved, still standing open, not withdrawn.

The writer has spent most of a chapter on people who did not enter a rest that was held out to them, and his conclusion is not that the offer was canceled. His conclusion is that it is still there.

Which means the question of whether it is yours has already been answered somewhere above your pay grade, and it was not answered by how much you have done this week.

You have a rest that remains open, and it was not withdrawn while you were busy. Hebrews 4:9 keeps the promise standing rather than expiring, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a standing promise into something a person can actually take hold of, which means the hour is not waiting on your permission because it was never yours to grant.

You cannot defend a thing you do not think is yours

Now the part you worked out yourself and could not say, which is the real obstacle and it is not your diary.

You give the hour away because you do not believe you have title to it. Hebrews 4:9 says there remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God, and it is written as a standing fact rather than as an offer to be applied for, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a deed feel like a deed.

And that is exactly right, and it explains everything, including why every organisational solution anybody has ever offered you has failed. You do not have an organizational problem. You have a question about ownership, and no amount of writing in pen will settle it.

So let me settle it from the passage rather than from encouragement.

Rest in Scripture is not issued as a reward for finished work. It is grounded in what God Himself did, on the seventh, when He was not tired, and it was written into law for people who would never once believe they could afford it. It comes to you as command and as gift in the same breath, and neither of those is a thing you qualify for.

You have title to this, and the title was given rather than earned. 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 rather than as one more demand, which means the hand you have not been able to put up is a hand you were always entitled to raise.

And I am not going to hand you a method. There is no scheme here for guarding time, nothing to keep up, no rule about how to say no. That would be one more thing to fail at and you have a diary full of those.

You are not the one holding this together, and nothing collapses in the hour you keep. Colossians 1:17 says by Him all things consist, and it is His Spirit at work in the ordinary machinery of the lives you are carrying, which means the reason your sister rang is not that the world requires you continuously.

I am not going to tell you which day either, and this site never will. That question has cost too much already and no reader will fail this by having a different answer to it. One hour, whenever, is the whole of it. God is the one holding you while you keep it, and He has been holding all of this while you were busy protecting everybody else.