Every Hour I Have Is Owed To Somebody

The day is spoken for by about six in the morning.

Not by you. It arrives that way. Medication, breakfast, the appointment, the call to the surgery that will take twenty five minutes on hold, the washing that has to be done today rather than tomorrow for reasons that are not negotiable.

And then the evening, which looks free on paper and is not, because you are listening. Even sitting down you are listening, and listening is not rest, and anybody who has done it knows the difference.

So when somebody suggests you take some time for yourself, you smile, because there is no time to take. There is no unclaimed hour anywhere in the week. Every hour is owed to somebody who genuinely needs it and who did not ask to need it.

Now I want to say something carefully, because you are the most likely person on this whole site to be given advice by people who have never done what you are doing.

I am not going to tell you to make time. That phrase is nonsense in a house like yours.

What I am going to say is different, and it is smaller, and it is harder.

There is no gap coming. You have been waiting for one. Somewhere in the back of it there is a belief that at some point the week will open, and then you will do the thing, and until then it would be wrong to take anything.

The week is not going to open. And so the twenty minutes, if it happens at all, will have to be taken out of the middle of a claimed day, while somebody still needs something.

That is the whole difficulty, and I am not going to pretend it away.

Come unto me, all ye that are heavy laden

There is an invitation in Matthew that gets quoted at tired people constantly, and usually the quoting makes it worse, so I want to read it slowly and honestly.

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. (Matthew 11:28, King James Version)

Come unto me, all ye that are heavy laden.

Notice the state of the people being invited. Not the rested. Not the ones with margin. The worn out and the loaded, which is to say, the ones who cannot come, addressed anyway.

You are the one being addressed in that invitation, and Matthew 11:28 is spoken to the loaded rather than to those with a free afternoon. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes an invitation given to exhausted people and lays it down in a house where the day was spoken for by six.

And then the second half, which is stranger and better. Take my yoke upon you. He does not offer to remove the load. He offers a different way of carrying, and rest unto your souls in the middle of the carrying rather than after it.

You have rest offered inside the load rather than on the far side of it, and it is already settled in the written word that the yoke and the rest arrive together. His Spirit is the one who says that over a woman who has been waiting for the week to open.

Nobody is going to give it to you

Now here is the hard part and I am going to say it plainly, because you deserve plainness rather than softness.

Nobody in your situation is going to hand you twenty minutes. Not because they are unkind. Because the people who might notice are either the person being cared for, who cannot, or people at a distance who assume a word would come if anything were needed.

So it will not be given. It will be taken. And taking feels wrong to you, which is exactly why it has not happened yet.

And I want one thing off you before you take it. What you make in that twenty minutes is not a measure of you, and neither is how well you are managing, and there is no standard of caring that requires a woman to have nothing left over.

You are permitted to take what will never be offered, and heaven has never once required a carer to wait for permission from the load. Matthew 11:28 puts the invitation to the heavy laden rather than to the free, and the Spirit of God is the one who hands over what nobody in the house is able to hand over.

And do not do it at eleven at night when everything is finished. That is not rest, that is the last scrapings of a day, and you have been doing that for months and it has not worked.

You have permission to take it out of the middle, and this is yours: the rest was offered to people still under the yoke. It is written in Matthew 11:28 that ye shall find rest unto your souls, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that findable on a Tuesday afternoon.

Twenty minutes, in the middle, undone

So here is the ask, and it will feel like the wrong time when you do it.

Tomorrow, in the middle of the day, take twenty minutes and make something with your hands. Not after. In the middle.

Use what is in the house. Sit in the same room if you have to, where you can still hear. This is not about getting away, because getting away is not available, and an instruction that requires it would be useless to you.

You are invited exactly as you are, loaded, and Matthew 11:28 addresses the heavy laden rather than the free. The Holy Spirit is the one who brings an invitation into a room where the door is left open on purpose.

Leave something undone to do it. That is the exercise. There will be a task that could have filled those twenty minutes, and it stays undone until later.

And here is the part that will be hardest. Do not do it well. Do not make it a project. Twenty minutes of poor work with half your attention listening down the hall is exactly what is being asked for and it is not a lesser version of anything.

You are covered while something stays undone, and Matthew 11:28 is the ground under that. The written word offers rest to the heavy laden without asking them to put the load down first, and the Spirit of God is present in a front room at two in the afternoon with the hall door open.