I Get Up More Tired Than I Sat Down

Aaron sets forty minutes and he has begun to dread the forty minutes.

He does this most days. He has done it for twenty-six years. And somewhere in the last three or four, without any decision being taken, it acquired a target, and then a duration, and then a quality standard, and now he gets up off the chair heavier than he sat down on it.

He can tell you exactly what a good session is. A good session is sustained, unbroken, focused, and long. A poor session is one where his mind went to the roof gutter twice and he had to bring it back, or where he ran out at twenty-two minutes and could not honestly account for the remaining eighteen.

He has a poor session about four days in seven.

And the poor ones cost him. Not in guilt exactly, which he would recognize and know what to do with. In something flatter than guilt: the sense of having attempted a thing and underperformed at it, which then sits over the rest of the morning.

He is sixty-one. He has taught on this. He has, more than once, said something to a younger man about not turning prayer into a performance, and he meant it, and he did not hear himself.

And the specific absurdity, which he has now seen and cannot unsee, is this: he is exhausted by the one form of prayer that requires nothing of his own composition. He has found a way to strive inside the thing that was supposed to carry him.

You may know that chair.

Maybe you also set a duration. Maybe you can grade your own sessions. And maybe you have never once wondered where the grading system came from.

The two words Isaiah attaches to it

There is a passage Paul reaches back and quotes in the middle of the chapter on this subject, and the sentence immediately after the one he quotes is the one you have never been given.

For with stammering lips and another tongue will he speak to this people. To whom he said, This is the rest wherewith ye may cause the weary to rest; and this is the refreshing.Isaiah 28:11-12

This is the rest. This is the refreshing.

Two nouns, both of them the opposite of labor, and they are the words the prophet puts directly beside the thing.

Not the discipline. Not the practice. Not the work, the exercise, the effort, or the offering. Rest and refreshing, which are words for what happens to a person who has stopped carrying something rather than words for a person carrying it well.

And note the second half of the first one: wherewith ye may cause the weary to rest. It is aimed at the tired. It is described as the provision for people who are already worn out, which is to say it was never designed to be one more thing they could fail at.

Which means the exhaustion you are producing is not coming from the thing. The thing is called rest. Whatever is tiring you is something you brought to the chair with you.

And you are holding a thing scripture names rest. The written word puts the rest and the refreshing beside this in the same breath, aimed specifically at the weary, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who brings that to a man who has dreaded a chair for three years.

And He gave you a way to pray past your own words. The word says the Spirit helpeth our infirmities, and helpeth is a word about weight being taken off rather than a word about a standard being met.

Where the grading system came from

Now the mechanism, because a man of sixty-one who has taught on this deserves the actual explanation rather than an encouragement.

You are a person who is competent at things. That is not a fault; it is most of what has made your life useful to other people, and it is why anybody sends a younger man to you.

Competence works by having a standard and measuring against it. It is how you read, how you prepare, how you carry every responsibility you have carried well for forty years, and it is entirely appropriate to almost everything you do.

And there is no border post between the parts of a life. The instrument that made you good at the rest of it walked into the room with you and did the only thing it knows how to do, which is to establish a metric and then report on it.

Nobody decided this. There is no moment three years ago you could go back and find, because it is not the kind of thing that happens at a moment. A tool you use everywhere got used here too, and the tool is not evil, and it has simply been applied to the one activity in your week that has no measurable output by design.

And what is tiring you is an instrument rather than a failure. The word says He knoweth our frame, He remembereth that we are dust, and the Spirit is the one who makes that cover a competent man's habits arriving where they were not needed.

And nothing about you is under review for four poor sessions in seven. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man for whom flatness has been sitting over the rest of the morning.

And nothing here says do less of it

Let me be plain, because you will convert anything into an instruction and I would rather hand you one you cannot fail.

Nothing here says shorten it, or lengthen it, or stop setting a time, or that the forty minutes was wrong. The number is not the problem and I am not replacing your standard with my standard.

And nothing here says you must have this. A person without it is not behind, is not missing a stage, and has not been graded by God on arrival, because the chapter that lists these things asks do all speak with tongues in a form that expects the answer no. Nor is anything here settling what belongs in a gathering, which is argued about by serious people and is not decided by an article.

What is on offer is only that the two nouns beside this in Isaiah are rest and refreshing, and that you have been the last person in the room to be given them.

And you are permitted to receive the thing you have been performing. The word aims this specifically at causing the weary to rest, and the Spirit is the one who applies it rather than requiring you to have earned your way back to the tired.