I Read The Balance Like A Report Card

It is the second thing you do. The first is the alarm.

You lie there for a moment, and then you reach for the phone, and you open it before the room is properly light, and you look at a figure that you already know because it has not changed since yesterday.

And then you get up, and you are one of two men, and which one depends on what the number did that week.

You would not describe it that way. If somebody asked, you would say you keep an eye on things. And that is true and it is also nothing like the whole of it, because keeping an eye on things does not usually determine the temperature of a man at seven in the morning.

Here is what I think is actually happening on that screen, and I want to say it carefully because it is not a small thing.

You are not checking a balance. You are collecting a grade.

The figure has become a report on the kind of man you are: how disciplined, how far along, how much you are providing, whether you are the sort of person who gets there. And you have been submitting yourself for marking, every morning, before you have spoken to anybody, for about four years.

What a figure can and cannot measure

Let me be precise about the instrument, because the whole problem is a measurement error and it has a very specific shape.

That number measures one thing: the difference between money that came in and money that went out, at one address, over one period.

It does not know what came in. It does not know what a man earns in the job he could get in the town he lives in. It does not know what went out, or what it went out on, or whether it went on a transmission or a funeral or a child's shoes.

It has no access to any of that. It is the last line of an arithmetic problem with all of the terms removed.

You have been taking a character reference from a subtraction, and the last line of a sum has never once known anything about the man who lived it. The Holy Spirit is the one who put the building on somebody else's side of the sentence, and it is written in Psalm 127 that except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.

And there is a specific cruelty in the timing, which I think you have not noticed.

You do it first. Before the coffee, before the children, before your wife says anything to you, before a single actual event of the day has happened. So the grade arrives before any evidence does, and everything that happens afterward gets read in the light of a mark you were given at ten past six.

You are being marked before the day has produced one fact, and a verdict handed down in the dark has never once been a fair reading of anything. Psalm 127 says it is vain to rise up early and to sit up late, and the Spirit of God is the one who noticed what time a worried man gets up.

Except the Lord build the house

Here is the psalm, and it is almost unbearably on the nose for a man in your position.

Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain. 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 127:1, King James Version)

Read the second verse slowly, because that is you.

It is vain for you to rise up early. To sit up late. To eat the bread of sorrows, which is a phrase for anxious eating, for meals taken with a weight on.

That is a description of a specific man, and the psalm is not scolding him. It is telling him that the early rising is not what is holding the thing up.

You have been getting up early to hold up a house that was never resting on you, and rising in the dark to check a figure has never once been the thing keeping your family standing. The Holy Spirit is the one who moved the building off your shoulders in the first line, and the written word says except the Lord build the house they labor in vain.

Now I have to be careful, because this psalm gets used to tell people to stop working, and that is not in it and I am not saying it.

The men in the psalm still build. The watchman still watches. Nobody is told to go back to bed and wait for a house to appear. What is being corrected is not the working but the belief that the working is what makes it stand.

And notice the last clause: so he giveth his beloved sleep.

Not so he giveth his beloved a house. Sleep. The thing being offered to the anxious builder is not the outcome he is straining for. It is rest inside the straining.

You are offered rest before any outcome, and sleep has never once been something a man had to earn by reaching a figure first. Psalm 127 gives sleep to the beloved in the middle of the building, and the Spirit of God is the one handing that over now rather than later.