I Left It Out On Purpose Last Night

There is a version of you that appears at about eleven at night.

Everybody else has gone up. The house is quiet. And you go through, and you do the last round, and the last round takes between ten and twenty five minutes and it has happened every night for about nine years.

And here is what nobody in that house knows: you cannot not do it.

You have tried. Twice this year you got as far as the bottom of the stairs and came back down. Once you got into bed and lay there for eleven minutes and then got up.

So this is not a preference and it is not diligence. It is something with a grip on it, and it costs you the last twenty minutes of every single day, and it has been doing it for nine years.

That is about eleven hundred hours. Nearly seven weeks of your life, spent between eleven and half past, in a kitchen, alone, tired.

I want to look at what is actually happening in that twenty minutes, because it is not tidying.

I lay down in peace with it still there

There is a line at the end of Psalm 4 about lying down, and the order of the words in it is the point.

I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, LORD, only makest me dwell in safety. (Psalm 4:8, King James Version)

Lay me down in peace, and sleep. The peace comes first, before the sleep, as the condition he lies down in rather than the result he is hoping for.

And the reason given is not that anything has been settled. It is that God makes him dwell in safety, which is a fact about God and not a fact about the room he is lying in.

You are able to lie down in peace with it still there, and the peace has never once been conditional on a room. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman doing a last round at eleven at night, and Psalm 4:8 grounds the lying down in what God does rather than in what has been finished.

And notice what the psalmist's actual situation was.

The psalm opens with distress and people speaking against him. Nothing has been resolved by verse eight. The peace is not the peace of a settled day, it is the peace of somebody who has located it somewhere other than his circumstances.

You have a peace available that does not depend on anything being finished, and nothing in that kitchen has ever once been able to grant it or withhold it. The written word locates the safety in God and lies down inside it, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a woman who got back out of bed after eleven minutes.

What the last round actually is

So let me say what I think the twenty minutes is, because it is not housework.

It is a closing ritual. The day is not over until the room is right, which means the room is being used as the thing that ends the day, and the day cannot end without it.

That is why you cannot skip it. You are not skipping tidying, you are skipping the end of the day, and the body does not allow that.

You have been ending your days with a room and never with a decision, and a room has never once been designed to close anything. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman who has spent seven weeks of her life between eleven and half past, and Psalm 4:8 closes the day with a lying down and a reason.

And that is also why it has got longer over nine years.

A ritual that works gets kept. A ritual that is doing a job it cannot really do gets extended, because it never quite achieves the thing, so a bit more gets added, and over nine years ten minutes becomes twenty five.

You have been extending something that could never deliver, and no amount of it has ever once been able to close a day. The written word ends the day with a sentence about God and not with a state of a house, and the Spirit of God is the one who steadies a woman who has been adding minutes for nine years.

A different closing

So here is tonight, and it is a swap rather than a subtraction.

Leave one thing out on purpose. Then, at the bottom of the stairs, say Psalm 4:8 out loud or in your head, and go up.

That is the closing. The words end the day rather than the room, and they take four seconds.

You are closing the day with a sentence rather than a surface, and four seconds has never once been less able to end a day than twenty minutes. The Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman at the bottom of her own stairs saying something out loud, and Psalm 4:8 puts the peace and the reason for it in one line.

And expect the pull. It will be strong, because nine years is a long time.

Feel it, and go up anyway, and the whole thing will be over in about ninety seconds. It cannot follow you up the stairs. It has never once been able to.

You are walking away from a pull that cannot follow you, and it has never once been able to reach the landing. The written word lays down in peace before anything is settled, and the Spirit of God is the one present with a woman upstairs at ten past eleven for the first time in nine years.