Five Hundred Times And Nothing

He is a man who counts things, and that is either the beginning of this problem or the only reason he has noticed it.

The psalm is not a famous one. He came to it in his early thirties, by accident, in a season he does not describe to people, and he has read it most mornings since. He is fifty six.

He worked it out once on the back of an envelope, properly, with allowances for illness and holidays and the four months after his father, and the figure was somewhere over five hundred.

He knows it in the way you know a hallway.

Since about February the mornings have produced nothing.

He is being precise, and he is not being dramatic. He sits, he reads it, he sits for a minute afterwards, and then he goes and has his breakfast, and if you asked him at nine o'clock what had happened at six forty he would tell you, honestly, that nothing had.

And being the man he is, he has begun to keep an account. Not on paper. But he could tell you that in the last eleven weeks there have been two mornings where something moved, and both of those were in the same week in April, and one of them was probably because he had slept badly.

Two out of seventy seven.

And on Thursday, sitting there at six forty with the page open, he thought a thought he was not proud of but which was honest, and it was: this is not a good use of the hour.

He read it anyway. He always reads it anyway. But he has been carrying that sentence around since Thursday like something in a pocket that keeps turning up in the hand.

Is not My word like a hammer

Sit down at the desk, because Jeremiah gets asked a version of your Thursday question and the answer comes back as an image, and the image settles the accounting.

Is not My word like as a fire, saith the Lord; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?Jeremiah 23:29

A hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces.

Now, you are a man who has held a hammer, so you know exactly how one of those works and you know it better than most people who quote this verse, and the written word chose that picture, and the Holy Spirit chose it for men with hands like yours.

You do not break a rock with the stroke that breaks it. You break it with the forty strokes before it, none of which appeared to do anything at all, every one of which was doing the entire job, and then one lands and the thing comes apart, and the last stroke gets the credit and deserves none of it.

Ask any man who has actually done it. He will tell you the rock was breaking the whole time.

Hear this at your own desk at six forty. You are not wasting the hour, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture calls itself a hammer on a rock, and the Holy Spirit is the one swinging it, and neither of them has ever measured a stroke by whether the man holding the handle felt something when it landed.

Now let me look at your ledger with you, because it is a well kept ledger and it is measuring the wrong column.

You have recorded two moments in eleven weeks. What you have not recorded is that you have sat down seventy seven times, and the written word never asked for the first column, and the Holy Spirit has been in the second one.

You have not recorded that on the morning after the difficult phone call in March you were at that desk at six forty. Or that in the second week of the flu you moved the chair nearer the radiator and did it anyway. Or that a man who reads a psalm on a morning when it does nothing is doing something a man who reads it for the feeling can never do.

Hear this too, and let it come off. You are not going backwards, and Scripture is what says so. What is written puts the power in the word and the swinging in the hands of God, and the Spirit of God has been at work in seventy seven mornings whether or not the rock moved visibly on any of them, and a fire does not stop being a fire in a room where nobody is watching it.

And now the thing about knowing it like a hallway, because you said that yourself and you meant it as a complaint.

A hallway is not a disappointment. A hallway is a thing you can cross in the dark.

There is coming a morning, and you will not know which one it is when you sit down, when you will need to cross that psalm in the dark, and you will do it without a light because the written word has been laid into you five hundred times, and the Holy Spirit will have used every single one of the seventy seven blank mornings to do it.