Nobody Is Paying For These Hours Now

For about forty years somebody bought your hours.

That is a plain way to say it and it is more or less accurate. You got up, you went, the hours went into something, and at the end of two weeks there was a number that said your hours had been converted into a thing the world recognized. You did not have to think about whether the day counted. The day counted because somebody paid for it.

Then it stopped.

And here is the thing that nobody tells a man about retirement. The counting did not stop with it. The counting looked around for a new auditor and found one, and it was you.

So now you get up, and there is a whole day, and by about eleven you have a low uneasy feeling that you cannot name. You did the crossword. You went for the paper. You looked at the garden and did not do anything to the garden. And in the back of your head something is asking, in a mild voice, what have you actually got to show for this morning.

Nobody is asking that but you. Your wife is not asking. Your children are not asking. There is no supervisor.

You have taken the job over yourself, and you are stricter than the last fellow was.

I have been up and down a lot of roads and sat with a lot of men in exactly this ditch, and I want to tell you what I have noticed. This is not laziness fighting discipline. This is a good man with no way to spend an hour that does not have to be defended.

And on the seventh day God ended his work

I want to take you all the way back to the second chapter of the Bible, because the answer to this is older than every argument about it.

Six days of making. Light, water, land, growing things, creatures, a man. Work of a scale nobody has matched since. And then this.

And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. (Genesis 2:2, King James Version)

He rested.

Now He was not tired. Nobody thinks God needed a lie down. And the seventh day did not produce anything: no new creature came out of it, nothing was added to the world, and by every measure you and I use, it returned nothing.

And it is the day He blessed.

You are looking at a day with no output that God Himself set apart, and Genesis 2:2 is where the pattern is written down before there was any law about it. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes the seventh day out of the first pages of Scripture and lays it across an ordinary Tuesday morning in a quiet house.

Think about what that means for the auditor in your head. The unproductive day was not tolerated. It was not squeezed in. It was built into the week by the One who made the week.

You have a rest that predates every rule about it, and it is already settled in the written word that the day producing nothing is the day that got blessed. His Spirit is the one who says that over a man who has spent eight months trying to justify a morning.

The report has no recipient

Here is where I want to be very plain, because a plain man sees this faster than most.

That report you file at eleven o'clock in your own head. Who reads it?

Not God. He blessed the day that made nothing. Not the people who love you. They would like you to be less tense at lunch. Not the men you worked with, who are doing exactly the same thing in their own kitchens and not saying so.

There is no recipient. The report goes into a drawer and the drawer is inside you, and you have been writing it every day for eight months for nobody.

You are not accountable to any auditor for this morning, and heaven has never once asked a man to show what an hour produced. Genesis 2:2 records a rest with no output and no explanation offered, and the Spirit of God is the one who closes a file nobody was reading.

And I will say the other thing. What you make in an unproductive hour is not a measure of the man. It never was, not when somebody was paying and not now. A bad carving on a Tuesday and forty years of good work are two different subjects entirely.

You have permission to produce nothing today, and this is yours: the seventh day was not a concession, it was the design. It is written in Genesis 2:2 that He ended and He rested, and the Holy Spirit is the one who will not let that be turned back into a duty.

Twenty minutes, and tell nobody

So here is the ask. It is small, and it has one condition on it that matters.

Today, take twenty minutes and make something that produces nothing. Whittle. Sketch. Mend a thing that is not broken. Sit at the bench and shape a piece of wood into no particular object.

Use what is in the house. Do not go out for anything, because going out for something is a task and a task is a report.

You have a morning that God Himself set apart, and Genesis 2:2 records a day that produced nothing and blessed it. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes a pattern from the beginning of the book cover an ordinary weekday.

And here is the condition. Tell nobody.

Do not mention at supper that you did a bit in the workshop. Not because it is shameful, but because the mentioning is the report, and the report is the thing we are dismantling. Let there be twenty minutes in your day that nobody knows about and nobody assesses.

It will feel idle. Good. Idle is the word the auditor uses. Let him say it.

You are covered in twenty minutes nobody knows about, and Genesis 2:2 is the ground under that. The written word gives a whole day to rest with no account rendered afterward, and the Spirit of God is present at a bench in the middle of a morning with nothing being made.