Rising Was Never Your Job

Della watched a good man do it for forty one years and she has never got over what it did to him.

He was her husband and there is nothing in this that is a complaint about him. He was kind, and he was funny in a dry way that took people a year to notice, and he thought the world of her, and everybody in that valley would have told you he was the best of them.

And he had a thing. And it came back.

She is not going to say what it was and neither am I, and it is not the point of this at all.

The point is what he did about it, which is what she has never got over.

He decided, early, without discussing it, that he was going to be the one who put himself right. Every single time. He never made excuses, he never blamed anybody, he never once said it was harder than it was. When it came back he got up on his own, in the dark, without telling her, and he set about it, and he was ashamed of needing anything.

She used to hear him downstairs at four in the morning some weeks. He would be sitting at the table with the light off. Not doing anything. Just sitting there, gathering himself up to start again from the beginning by himself.

Forty one years of that.

And she said the thing to her sister once, in the kitchen, after he had gone. She said: he was carrying himself the way a man carries a beam. He was the crane and he was the load, both at once, and I never once got him to put either of them down.

And she said that she thought, at the end, it was not the thing that wore him out. It was the arrangement.

And this is where I stop writing about Della's husband, because you have been doing both jobs.

I am not going to ask what your thing is and I am not going to ask how long. That is yours and it stays yours.

Count the verbs

I want to give you a verse and I want you to do one thing with it, which is to notice who is doing every single action in it.

He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.Psalm 40:2

Four verbs. Brought up. Out of. Set. Established.

Every one of them has the same subject and it is not the man in the pit.

That is worth going slowly over, because you have probably read this verse a hundred times and heard it as a description of somebody who got out. He did not get out. He was brought up. Psalm 40 is not being poetic there; it is being precise about who did what, and the Holy Spirit has been the one doing all of it in you while you kept a hand on the beam.

And look at the third one especially. Set my feet upon a rock. The feet did not find the rock. The rock was not located by effort. Somebody put the feet on it, which is what you do for a person who cannot do it themselves.

So take that at four in the morning at your own kitchen table. You are not the one doing the lifting, and Psalm 40:2 has every verb in it belonging to God, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the setting of feet on ground you did not find.

And the fourth verb is the one that will let you sleep. Established my goings. Goings means the ordinary walking about afterwards: the days, the weeks, the going to work. Even that is His.

Which means the arrangement you have been living under, the one where He might get you out but you have to keep yourself out, is not in that verse anywhere. The written word gives Him the pit and the clay and the rock and the walking, and the Spirit of God has been doing all four of those in you while you sat in the dark believing it was your job.