Not Used Up On Me

It is ten past four and you have the number.

It is not written anywhere. You would never write it down. But you could say it out loud right now if somebody put a hand on your shoulder and asked you for it, because you have been keeping it for years, and you are keeping it tonight in the dark with a cup of tea going cold beside you.

The first one counts as a big one. Everybody knew about the first one. There were people who prayed for weeks, and a woman who drove you places for a month, and a church that got told about it in a careful way from the front.

The second one nobody knew about, which somehow makes it heavier rather than lighter, because at least the first one was out in the open.

Then the four small ones, and you have never settled whether those count as four or as one long one.

And now there is this. It is not small. The whole of you knows exactly what has to happen next, and you are sitting in the dark at ten past four not doing it.

Because you have run the arithmetic and it comes out badly.

You are not afraid He is angry. That is not it, and people keep offering you that and it never lands, and you have stopped correcting them. You believe He is kind. You have never once doubted for a moment that He is kind.

What you believe is that kindness is a quantity.

That you have had a great deal of it, more than most, considerably more than the woman two doors up who has never needed a single hour of any of this. That somewhere behind the kindness there is a total. And that you are further along that total than anyone who loves you would guess.

So you sit there with the cold tea.

And you do not ask, because you cannot bear the sound of yourself asking again.

Arithmetic on something that is not an account

Let me sit down beside you at that table, because the sum being run there is the wrong operation, and it will help to see why.

You have been counting withdrawals against a balance, and mercy is not held that way anywhere. Lamentations 3:23 does not describe a supply that goes down as it is drawn on. It describes a morning, and a morning is a delivery rather than a store, and the Holy Spirit is not a clerk who checks what came the day before.

Everything else in a life works the way that sum works, which is why the sum feels like wisdom. Patience runs out. Goodwill wears thin. The friend who drove you places has a finite number of Saturdays in her. A person who has needed a great deal of help learns to be careful with it, and that care is decent, and it is part of why anybody sits up at four in the morning not asking. Nobody invents the counting. Life teaches it, and life is right about nearly everything except this.

The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22-23

Look at where that line is standing when it gets said, because the address changes everything about it. It is not written by a man having a good week. Twenty verses earlier in the same chapter the writer calls himself the man who has seen affliction, and the city behind him is rubble, and from inside that he says the mercies came new this morning. You are not the first person to say that sentence from the wrong side of a collapse, and the word puts those two facts in one chapter deliberately, and the Spirit of God has never once treated ashes as a disqualifying address.

And notice the tense of the delivery, because the tense is carrying the whole weight. New every morning. Not replenished, which would imply a level that had dropped. Not extended, which would imply a term that somebody granted and could decline to grant again. New. Which means the mercy arriving on the morning ahead of you has never been used by anybody at all, including you, because it did not exist until this morning.

Now the actual ache, and I want to name it correctly rather than approximately. What is keeping you in that chair is not guilt about what happened. It is the sound of your own voice asking again. It is the thought of the same words coming out of the same mouth about the same thing, and somewhere behind that, a picture of a face going carefully still with patience.

That picture is not of God and it never has been. You have never once been met by Him as a repeat, and Scripture keeps showing the opposite of the face you are dreading: a man who denied Him three times beside one fire was given breakfast beside another one and handed his work straight back, and the Holy Spirit does not carry a cooler edition of that welcome for the second visit.

Let me put one plain thing in the middle of this, because four in the morning is where a lot of people are reading it. If the arithmetic has started to include a sum where everybody comes out ahead without you in it, that thought needs a living voice tonight rather than a calculation. Tell somebody: a friend, your doctor, whoever will pick up at this hour. In the United States, 988 answers by call and by text. Anywhere else, emergency services or your local crisis line. That is not a failure of faith, there is no total running on that line either, and nobody answering it hears a burden. God has always put real rescue into human hands, and reaching for one of them is obedience, not defeat.