I Cannot Stop Working On It Long Enough To Sit In It

Your friend came on Saturday and you gave her a tour.

That is what you called it, and it was a tour, and it took forty minutes, and in the course of it you explained what was going to happen to the hallway, and what the plan is for the room at the back, and about the floor.

At no point in the forty minutes did either of you sit down.

She left at about four and you did the baseboards in the front room until it got dark.

That was weekend nine.

You could name all nine. The first was cleaning, which everybody does. Two and three were the painting. Four was the thing with the garage that took longer than it should have. Five was your brother coming to help with the floor, which was a good day and which was also work.

Nine weekends. And here is the sentence that arrived on Sunday evening while you were washing brushes, and which you have not been able to shift since.

I have never sat down in this house.

Not once. Not for twenty minutes, in a chair, in a room, doing nothing.

What the list is for

Let me offer you a reading of the nine weekends, because I do not think the reason is the obvious one.

The obvious reason is that there is a lot to do, which is true, and which would explain about four of them.

Here is the other one. While there is a list, nobody in this house has arrived. Sitting down is what a person does when a thing is finished, and this is not finished, so sitting down is not available. And as long as it is not available, you do not have to find out what it feels like to be a woman who has got what she wanted.

That is a much stranger thing to have to find out than a baseboard is to paint.

You have a list standing between you and a room, and nine weekends of good work has never once been the same as having arrived anywhere. The Holy Spirit is the one who has been in that front room while the light went, and it is written in Ecclesiastes 3 that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his own work.

And notice that the list cannot run out.

A house does not finish. There will be a tenth weekend and a twentieth, and the day the hallway is done the room at the back begins, and this can go on for four years without anybody making a decision about it.

So the sitting down does not arrive at the end of the work, because there is no end of the work. It has to be taken out of the middle of it, deliberately, by somebody who decides to.

You have been waiting for an end that does not exist, and a house has never once been the kind of thing that finishes and lets somebody sit. Ecclesiastes 3 puts the eating and the enjoying alongside the labor rather than after it, and the Spirit of God is the one who arranged them that way.

Enjoy the good of all his work

Here is the verse, and the placement of it in that chapter is the whole point.

And also that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labour, it is the gift of God. (Ecclesiastes 3:13, King James Version)

Enjoy the good of all his labor.

Not: enjoy the rest after the labor. Not: enjoy it when it is done. The good of the labor itself, enjoyed by the man doing it, while he is still the man doing it.

And look at where that sits. It comes immediately after the passage about a time to plant and a time to build up, which is the most work heavy chapter in the book. The enjoying is set down right in the middle of all that doing, not at the end of it.

You are being handed something meant for the middle of the work, and no gladness in scripture has ever once been scheduled for after a house is finished. The Holy Spirit is the one who placed it there, and the written word puts the eating and the enjoying inside the chapter about seasons of work.

And then the last clause, which is the one that settles the question of whether you are allowed.

It is the gift of God.

The eating and the drinking and the enjoying are not a reward for having earned a break. They are described as a gift, which is a thing given rather than a thing achieved, and a gift cannot be deferred until the recipient has done enough.

You have been offered a gift rather than a break, and nothing described as a gift has ever once had to be worked up to. Ecclesiastes 3 calls the enjoying the gift of God outright, and the Spirit of God is the one who classified it that way.