A Number On A Piece Of Paper In My Drawer

The page is in the second drawer down.

You have looked at it more times this month than you would admit to anybody. Not to check it. You know what it says. You look at it the way a man presses on a bruise.

And somewhere in the last year the figure on it stopped being information.

It used to be a fact about a season. Now it is a report card. It tells you what kind of father you are, and it does it every time you open that drawer, and you keep opening the drawer.

You are up at five and you are still awake at one, and in between there is a kind of low grinding that never quite stops, and the number is in most of it.

There is a psalm about a man doing exactly this, and it is startlingly blunt about it.

It is vain for you to rise up early

Here it is.

It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep. (Psalm 127:2, King James Version)

Vain. Not wrong. Not sinful. Vain, which means empty, which means it does not produce what it is being done for.

That is a hard word to hear about the last year of your life, and it is not an accusation. It is a report on the mechanism.

You have been running something that cannot produce what it is aimed at, and the Holy Spirit is the one who chose that word. Psalm 127:2 calls the rising early and the sitting late vain rather than wicked, and He chose the word that takes the blame out while leaving the diagnosis in.

Now look at the middle phrase, because it is the one that describes your evenings exactly.

To eat the bread of sorrows. Not to suffer a sorrow. To eat it. To take it in, deliberately, as the thing that sustains you, the way a man eats a meal.

That is the drawer. That is opening it when there is no reason to open it. That is a man feeding himself on a figure.

You have been eating something rather than merely enduring it, and it is written that the bread of sorrows is a thing a person consumes rather than a thing that happens to them. The Spirit of God is the one who names a habit precisely, and precision here is a kindness rather than a rebuke.

And the psalm is not telling you to work less or care less. It is not a lecture about balance.

It is saying that the particular grinding you are doing is not attached to the outcome you want. The five in the morning does not move the figure. The one in the morning does not move it either. The figure is what it is and the grinding is separate from it.

You are carrying something that is not connected to what you are carrying it for, and Scripture calls that emptiness rather than failure. The Holy Spirit is the one who cuts a rope that was never attached to anything.

The number is doing a job it cannot do

Now let me say what has actually happened, because it is a specific substitution and it is worth seeing.

Somewhere in the last year the figure stopped answering a question about money and started answering a question about you.

Those are different questions and only one of them can be answered by a number. A page of arithmetic knows nothing whatever about what kind of father a man is, and it has never once been consulted on the subject by anybody who could actually judge.

You have been asking a page a question it cannot answer, and it is written that the labor of the anxious man is vain rather than that it is measuring anything. The Spirit of God is the one who takes a question away from an unqualified authority, and He is taking it back now.

And I need to say one plain thing here, and it is not a diagnosis of you, because I cannot see you and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

For some men this stops being about a page. If the nights have gone somewhere dark, if the thought has come that the people in that house would be better off without you, that is not a thought to sit with alone in a garage at one in the morning. Call or text 988 in the United States and it is answered by a person. Then tell somebody real: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, somebody qualified who can sit with you in it.

You are worth a phone call at one in the morning, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a man to reach for help. It is written that He giveth His beloved sleep rather than that He waits for a man to earn it, and reaching is not a failure of anything.

And back to the ordinary version of it, because for most men this is the ordinary version.

Your children do not have access to that page. They have never seen it. What they have is a man in a garage with the door rolled up, and whether he looked at them today, and whether he was there.

You have been graded by your children on something entirely different, and the written word puts the vanity in the grinding rather than in the man. The Spirit of God is the one who knows what a child is actually keeping a record of, and it is not a figure.

He giveth his beloved sleep

Now the last clause, and it is the one the whole psalm is built to arrive at.

For so he giveth his beloved sleep.

Sleep is what He gives. Not the figure. Not a turn in the year. The psalm does not promise anybody that the number changes, and I am not going to promise it either, because that is not in the text and it is not mine to say.

What is in the text is rest, given, to somebody described as beloved.

You are the person that clause is describing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put rest in that sentence rather than an outcome. It is written that He giveth his beloved sleep rather than that He gives the anxious man results, and He put it there for men lying awake at one.

And notice the word beloved, because it is doing something important.

It is not conditional on the figure. It is not awarded for a good year. It is what he is called while he is lying there awake, in the middle of the vain rising and the vain sitting up, before anything has been sorted out at all.

You have been called beloved in the middle of the worst year, and His word attaches that name to the man rather than to his circumstances. The Spirit of God is the one who does the naming, and He has not revised the name this year.

So the practical instruction is smaller than you would expect.

Stop opening the drawer. That is it. Not a plan, not a resolution about the year, not a conversation with anybody. Leave the page where it is and stop pressing the bruise.

You are able to leave a drawer closed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets a man past a drawer. It is written that the eating of the bread of sorrows is something a man does rather than something done to him, and past it is the whole distance.