It Was Decided in March

The email said nine o'clock, all staff, and gave no other information at all.

That was Thursday at four. Which means three hundred and forty people went home on Thursday evening with one sentence and a start time, and by about eight that night the whole town knew, because the whole town works there or is married to somebody who does.

Bry has been a supervisor for eleven years. People rang him. That is the part nobody plans for: he knew exactly as much as they did, which was nothing, and eleven of them rang him anyway, because he is the one you ring.

He said the same thing eleven times. I do not know any more than you do. And they said thanks Bry, and rang off, and he could hear in every one of them that it had helped slightly and that it should not have.

By eleven he was in the yard.

He did not plan that either. He drove down to get something out of his locker that he did not need, which is a thing men do, and Ged was there, sitting on the loading step with a flask, because Ged is sixty-three and has stopped pretending he sleeps.

They did not say much for a while.

Then Bry said, "What do you reckon."

And Ged said, "I have been through three of these."

He poured some into the cup and handed it over, which was not a small thing, because it was the only cup.

"And the one thing I know," he said, "is that whatever they tell us at nine, they already know it now. They have known it for weeks. Somebody sat in a room in March and it was decided in March, and everything since then has been the paperwork walking downhill."

Bry said that was not exactly comforting.

And Ged said, "No. It is not comfort. But you have been lying there since Thursday trying to affect it, and I am telling you it was over before you got the email."

Then, after a while: "So you might as well sleep, lad. It is the same nine o'clock either way, and you are the only thing you can wreck between now and then."

Now let me ask you what yours is.

Because there is a nine o'clock. The scan result, the vote, the letter, the phone call, the conversation somebody else is going to open. And you are lying there tonight going through it, and something in you believes the going through is doing something.

There is another room

The psalmist writes a line that is short enough to be missed and is the whole of this message.

But our God is in the heavens; He does whatever He pleases.Psalm 115:3

Read the context, because it changes what the sentence is doing. The nations around them are asking, out loud, where Israel's God is. It is a taunt. The obvious reply would be a defense.

And what comes back is not a defense. It is a location. Our God is in the heavens.

He is not being asked to account for Himself and He is not going to. He is in a room that the people doing the taunting are not in, and the psalm's answer to a mocking question is simply to state where the deciding happens.

So hear this said over you, on the loading step at eleven at night. There is a room your nine o'clock was decided in, and it is not the room you think, and you were never going to be in either of them. That is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a fact about a throne and turns it into something a man can actually lie down under, which is a different work from agreeing with it.

Now, Ged was right about the arithmetic and only half right about the comfort, and the other half is the reason this article exists.

He is right that it was decided in March. Every nine o'clock has a March. By the time anybody tells you a thing, it has already been a thing for a while, and the hours you spend the night before are hours spent on a decision that is already sitting in somebody's file.

Where he stops is the room. Ged's version has a boardroom in March and nothing above it, and that is a fact without a floor: it tells you to stop struggling and gives you nothing to lie down on.

The psalm puts a room above the room.

He does whatever He pleases. Which does not mean the outcome will be the one you want, and this article will not tell you it will be. It means the boardroom in March was not the top of the building.

That is the whole difference between resignation and rest, and they look identical from outside. Resignation says: it is out of my hands, and there is nothing there. Rest says: it is out of my hands, and it is in His.

Now let me guard this, because sovereignty gets used to say cruel things and I will not have it used that way here.

Nothing in this message says God arranged the closure. Nothing here says there is a lesson in your nine o'clock that you are supposed to be extracting, and nothing says it is for the best. Those sentences are handed to people in your position constantly, they are not in Psalm 115, and they are not here.

And nothing here tells you to stop acting. Go in at nine. Ask the questions. Speak up for the people who cannot. Get the union rep, get the second opinion, write the letter. Scripture is full of people who did everything within reach, and there is no verse anywhere that asks a person to go slack because God is on the throne.

The only thing being taken off you is the outcome, and it was never on you.

You are held tonight by somebody who does not need you conscious to keep governing. The written word says He who keeps you will not slumber, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a person able to close their eyes on an unfinished thing, and He does that in His own way and on nobody's timetable.

There was a movement five hundred years ago whose people had no vote in anything that mattered to them. No say in the throne, no say in the law, frequently no legal right to gather. And the thing they held on to was not that it would go well, because for a good many of them it went extremely badly. It was that there was a room above the room, and no announcement made in the lower one was final.

They were not winners working out a theory. They were people with no leverage working out what could not be taken off them.