Better Than A Thousand Anywhere Else

The hour is not the problem. She has the hour. She fought for the hour and she got it and she has kept it for six weeks.

What happens in the hour is that a second thing runs underneath it, all the way through, like a radio in another room.

She sits down and she starts, and somewhere around the fourth minute a voice that sounds exactly like her own begins listing. The invoices could be out by now. That email has been sitting since Tuesday and it is going to get worse. She could have done the whole of the upstairs in this. She could have called her sister, who she has not called.

And she prays over the top of it, which is what she has learned to do, and at the end of the hour she gets up and the thing she feels is not peace. It is the low, specific tiredness of having done two jobs at once.

She has not told anybody, because how would you say it. I gave God an hour and I spent it doing the accounts on the hour.

Six weeks of that. She is starting to think the hour might be costing her more than it is worth, and the fact that she can form that sentence at all is what frightened her enough to be reading this.

If there is a radio going in another room while you pray, come and sit down. Nobody is going to ask you to turn it off by willpower.

Somebody in the Bible ran the same comparison and wrote down the result

Here is the thing that ought to be comforting before it is anything else: the arithmetic she is doing is in Scripture. Somebody did it first, out loud, and it got written down.

For a day in thy courts is better than a thousand. I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God, than to dwell in the tents of wickedness.Psalm 84:10

Look at what that is. It is a comparison. He is weighing one thing against another and he is giving you the exchange rate. A day here against a thousand anywhere else. The lowest job in this house against a comfortable position in another one.

Which means the man writing it had also stood there doing the sums. You do not produce a sentence like that without having weighed it. He is not somebody who never noticed the alternative. He is somebody who noticed it, priced it, and came out the other side.

And notice he does not say the thousand days were worthless. They are real days. The tents were real tents and presumably quite comfortable. He is not pretending the other side of the ledger is empty. He is saying what it comes to when you actually run the numbers.

You are not being unspiritual by noticing the alternative, and you were in good company the whole six weeks. Psalm 84:10 is where that sits, in a verse that is structurally a piece of arithmetic, and the same Spirit who let a comparison into the songbook is the one who takes the shame off a woman who has been running one.

The voice is not neutral and it is not yours

Now the part that changes the hour, and it is not about trying harder.

That listing voice presents itself as accounting. It sounds sober and responsible and it uses real items, which is why it is convincing. But look at what it never does. It never runs the other way.

It never sits with her at the desk at four in the afternoon and says: you could be with God right now. It never interrupts the upstairs to mention the hour. It only ever runs in one direction, and a scale that only tips one way is not a scale, it is a thumb.

That is the tell. Genuine wisdom about your time will weigh both sides and it will sometimes tell you to leave the room and go do the invoices, and that is fine and I would say so. What she has been living with is not that. It is a single-direction voice that has been charging her for the one hour of her week she gave away.

You have been listening to a scale with a thumb on it, and you were never actually being weighed. That sentence belongs to Romans 8:1, where there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, and His Spirit does not run a commentary on the hour a woman gives Him.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, the thing that outranks everything above.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there will not be one here.

And every word above works the same for a woman eating three meals a day. The hour we are talking about is any time you can free, however you freed it, and there is no version of this where your body has to be involved at all.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your husband is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is good manners. None of it fails anything.

You are not further along or further back than anybody because of what your body can do. Scripture settled that long before you got here (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Spirit of God is not apportioned according to anybody's medical situation.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.