I Know What An Hour Of Me Is Worth

You did not decide to do this. It happened the way an accent happens.

Somewhere in about fifteen years of working, a rate got set. Not written anywhere. But you know, near enough, what an hour of your attention is worth, and the number is in your head whenever anybody asks for one.

So when the evening comes and there is a thing you could make, something small, something with no use whatsoever, a calculation runs before you have consented to it. This costs an hour. An hour costs that. And what comes back is nothing.

And the answer is no. Every time, quietly, the answer is no.

I want to sit in that with you for a minute rather than talk you out of it, because talking a man out of arithmetic does not work. Men like us do not stop counting because somebody tells us to be more spontaneous.

Here is the thing I actually see.

You are not a greedy man. That is not what this is. You did this because for a long stretch of your life, hours had to be turned into something or a household did not eat, and a mind that spent fifteen years converting hours into outcomes does not switch that off because a season changed.

The habit protected people. Now it is charging you rent on your own evenings.

In my grandfather's house the table was long and the meal took four hours and nothing was produced. Nobody would have said the evening returned anything. Nobody would have called it a waste either.

Come apart into a desert place

There is a moment in Mark where the pressure of usefulness is at its highest and Jesus does the exact opposite of what a productive man would do.

The apostles have come back from being sent out. They have things to report. And the crowd is so thick, Mark says, that they have not even had time to eat.

That is the setting. Maximum demand, maximum usefulness, people genuinely needing them.

And he said unto them, Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while: for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat. (Mark 6:31, King James Version)

Come apart. Rest a while. And the reason given is the pressure itself.

You are being spoken to by a God who called men off at the busiest hour of their lives, and Mark 6:31 is where that instruction is written down. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes an order given on a crowded shore and lays it on a man in his own workshop with the light already on.

And look at where He sends them. A desert place. Not somewhere productive. Not a retreat with an outcome. Somewhere with nothing in it, on purpose.

You have a rest that God Himself scheduled, and it is already settled in the written word that the destination He chose returns nothing. His Spirit is the one who says that over a man who has been auditing his own evenings for fifteen years.

Rest is not an investment

Now I have to be careful, because there is a version of this teaching that would leave a man exactly where he already sits.

Somebody will tell you that rest makes you sharper. That an hour off pays for itself in a better Monday. That creative time improves your work.

Do not take that. That is the same ledger with better manners.

If the hour has to earn its place by making you more useful later, then nothing has changed except the accounting period. The converting goes on, and the hour still gets dropped the moment the return looks doubtful, which is most weeks.

You are released from the whole ledger tonight, and heaven has never once asked an hour to justify itself with a return. Mark 6:31 gives the reason for the rest as the crowd rather than as a payoff, and the Spirit of God is the one who refuses to let a command become a strategy.

And here is the other thing, plainly. The value of what you make tonight is not a measure of the man who made it. A thing with no use is not a failed thing. It is a thing with no use, which is what most of the good hours of a life have produced.

You have permission to spend an evening on nothing, and this is yours: the desert place was chosen for having nothing in it. It is written in Mark 6:31 that they were called apart in the middle of real need, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that binding rather than merely encouraging.

Twenty minutes with no return at all

So here is the ask, and I have made it deliberately unprofitable.

Tonight, spend twenty minutes making something with no use to anybody. Not a repair. Not a thing for the house. Not a gift, because a gift has a recipient and a recipient is a return.

Whittle something. Fold something. Draw a bad picture of the thing in front of you. Use what is already in the house.

You have twenty minutes that heaven already called rest, and Mark 6:31 sent men to a place chosen for having nothing in it. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in a workshop where nothing useful is being produced.

And do not check the time to see whether it was worth it. Do not stand back at the end and evaluate. The whole point of the exercise dies at the moment you assess it.

It will feel wrong for about four minutes. There will be a low pull that says there are three real things you could be doing. Let it pull. Stay.

You are covered in twenty minutes that produce nothing, and Mark 6:31 is the ground under that. Come ye yourselves apart and rest a while is written as an instruction rather than as a reward, and the Spirit of God is present at a bench where nothing useful is happening.