There Was One Hour I Could Not Account For

You know the feeling exactly, so let me describe it back to you.

The evening is more or less accounted for. There was the thing at six, and the calls, and the thirty minutes you had put aside for the reading. And then somewhere between about half eight and half nine there is a gap you cannot fill in.

You were in the house. Nothing happened. You were not asleep. And you genuinely cannot say what that hour went on.

And in the same second that you notice, something drops. Not panic. Not guilt exactly. A small cold slide, a couple of inches, low down. And then a thought arrives in the shape of a question, which is: what happened to it.

I want to stay with the drop for a moment, because the drop is the whole article and everything else is commentary.

That feeling is what a person feels when they have lost something that belonged to somebody else.

It is not the feeling of forgetting where your own hour went. It is the feeling of a steward who cannot produce an item on an inventory. Somewhere along the way the hours stopped being yours and became something held in trust, with a return expected, and a gap in the record now reads as a shortfall rather than as a Tuesday evening.

Nobody handed you that job. You have been doing it faithfully for years.

My times are in thy hand

There is a line in the middle of a hard psalm, and it is the answer to this, and it is only six words long.

David is in trouble. He is being hunted, and the psalm is full of the sound of a man whose days are not his own to plan. And in the middle of that, he says something that is either the most passive sentence in Scripture or the most restful, depending entirely on who is holding the hand.

My times are in thy hand: deliver me from the hand of mine enemies, and from them that persecute me. (Psalm 31:15, King James Version)

My times are in thy hand.

Not my days are accounted for. Not I have given a good return on the hours entrusted to me. My times are in thy hand, which is to say, somebody else is holding them and that somebody is not me.

You are holding hours that were never in your own keeping, and Psalm 31:15 puts them into God's hand rather than into a record you maintain. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line written by a hunted man and lays it across an evening you cannot account for.

And notice that it is said in trouble rather than in leisure. This is not a sentence from a man with a free week. It is said by somebody whose time is being taken from him by force.

You have times that rest in a hand strong enough to hold them, and it is already settled in the written word that the holding is His. His Spirit is the one who says that over a woman who has been keeping the inventory herself.

An hour is not an item

Now let me take the ledger apart, because the ledger has been very good to you in some ways and it is not going to give up easily.

Tracking time is not a sin. It is often kindness. It is how three people get to appointments and how somebody keeps a promise, and I am not going to tell a careful woman to become careless.

But an hour is not an item. It cannot be lost, misplaced or stolen. It passed, the way every hour passes, and the passing is not a subtraction from anything.

And more than that. What comes out of an hour is not a measure of the woman inside it. An unrecorded evening is not a hole. It is an evening that nobody wrote down, which is what most of the good evenings in a human life have been.

You are not short an hour anywhere, and heaven has never once kept a record of time in the form of a balance. Psalm 31:15 hands the times over rather than auditing them, and the Spirit of God is the one who will not let an evening be entered as a deficit.

And here is the move I want to head off, because you will reach for it. Do not go and account for it retroactively. Do not sit and reconstruct what that hour probably was so the record closes. Closing the record keeps the record.

You have permission to leave a gap open, and this is yours: an unaccounted hour was already in His hand while you were looking for it. It is written in Psalm 31:15 that my times are in thy hand, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a fact rather than a comfort.

Twenty minutes, and write it nowhere

So here is the ask, and the second half of it is the part that will cost you something.

Tonight, spend twenty minutes making something. Anything with your hands, with whatever is already in the house.

And then do not record it. Anywhere. Not in the app, not in the notebook, not in the mental tally you do while you brush your teeth. If a place exists where you would normally note it, that place stays empty.

You have times that already sit in a hand that is not yours, and Psalm 31:15 puts them there without any reckoning attached. The Spirit of God is the one who takes an inventory out of a woman's hands who was never issued one.

That is the exercise. The making is almost incidental. The unrecorded part is what is actually being dismantled.

It will itch. There will be a pull, around the time you put it down, to at least register that the evening was used well. Do not. Let one evening this week be genuinely unaccounted for, on purpose, by choice.

What you make will be small and probably wrong. Leave it wrong and leave it out.

You are covered while a gap stays open in the record, and Psalm 31:15 is the ground under that. The written word puts the times in God's hand rather than in a reckoning you keep, and the Spirit of God is present in a living room with something half made on the floor.