One Fixed Point in the Week

The week Marianne's shifts went to the new pattern, everything came loose at once, and it took her about four months to work out what had actually happened.

It was not the hours. She checked. She is on almost exactly the same hours she was before.

It was that nothing lands in the same place twice. Monday might be a long one or might be nothing. The Thursday she used to have is sometimes a Wednesday and sometimes a Saturday. So the shopping happens whenever there is a gap, and the washing happens whenever it becomes urgent, and the phone call to her mother happens when she remembers, which is less often than she would like and she feels that.

Every single thing in her week is now a decision.

That is the part nobody warns you about. She is not doing more than she was. She is deciding more than she was, and she is deciding the same things over and over, because nothing has been settled in advance and so nothing stays settled. When do I eat. When do I sleep. Is this a night I can see anybody. Should I go to that, or is that the week I will be wrecked.

And underneath all of it, the low continuous hum of a thing she has stopped putting into words: I do not know what my life looks like any more.

She is not depressed. She has checked that too, properly, with somebody who knows. She is not in crisis and she is not falling apart. She is tired in a way that sleeping does not fix, and the tiredness has a very specific flavour, which is the flavour of a person who has had to hold every single edge of their own week up by hand for four months.

The prayer went first. Not by decision. It used to be Tuesday nights, at the table, after the plates. Now there is no Tuesday night in any reliable sense, so there is no after the plates, so there is nothing.

She has tried to fix it three times. Each time with a system. A proper one, color coded, the second time with an app. Each system lasted nine days and then a shift changed and the whole apparatus fell over, and she felt worse afterwards than she had before, because now she had also failed at the system.

So she has stopped trying to fix it, and she just holds it all up by hand, and she is so tired.

And you know this feeling, because your week may have gone loose for an entirely different reason. A new baby. A parent who needs you. Working for yourself. Being between things. Something ended and the shape of your days went with it.

You are not lazy and you are not disorganized.

You have just been asked to carry the structure of your own life in your hands, all day, every day, and no one can do that for long.

The thing you think is a cage was built as a kindness

Let me clear away the wrong answer first, because I think you have already been offered it, and it did not work, and it left a mark.

The wrong answer is a system.

A rule of life, a plan, a properly ordered set of disciplines: those things are good and I am not going to say a word against them. But they are the answer to a different question, and handing one to somebody in your situation is like handing a scaffold to a person carrying a door. It is more to hold.

So I am not going to give you one. There is no program in this message, and nothing here that you can fail.

I want to change something much smaller and much further upstream, which is what you believe order is for.

Because you have started to feel it as a cage. That is not unreasonable. Every system you tried was a set of bars you then broke, and something in you has quietly concluded that structure is a demand made of you by a life that has already got enough demands in it.

Now listen to how Jesus talks about the most ordered thing in the whole of Scripture, in one line, to people who had turned it into exactly that cage.

The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.Mark 2:27

Look at the direction of that sentence. It runs from the structure toward the person. The fixed point was made for the human being. It was designed, on purpose, as a thing that would carry a person, and the argument He is having is with people who had turned the carrying thing into a testing thing.

Order was never invented to measure you.

It was invented so that certain questions would stop needing to be asked. That is what a fixed point actually does: it removes a decision from your hands permanently, and hands the week a bone.

And this is why it is mercy and not law. A cage is a thing you are inside and cannot leave. A fixed point is a thing you can lean on. One takes your freedom. The other gives you back the six days of small decisions you were spending on it.

There were people once who held on to the conviction that God governs whether or not anybody in authority agrees, and who then, being sensible, built ordinary structures underneath it: shared decisions, plain meetings, schools so that ordinary children could read the thing for themselves. Not because order was holy in itself. Because when everything else is unreliable, a person needs at least one thing in the week that is not up for negotiation.

That is what has been taken from you. Not your energy.

Your one thing that was not up for negotiation.

So hear this said over you, tired in a way that sleeping has not touched. You are not required to invent your week out of nothing every seven days, and the rest you have been treating as a luxury was made for you rather than the other way round. That is written into Jesus own sentence that the Sabbath was made for man, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the Comforter given to us, and He does that work in a person who has stopped deciding everything twice.