The Hour Nobody Has To Approve

The building has forty desks in one room and one meeting pod with a glass door.

He works out, in about his third week, that the glass pod is worse than nothing. You go in there and you are on display, and someone will ask afterwards, kindly, whether everything is all right, because a man who goes into a glass box on his own for ten minutes is a man with a situation.

There is a stairwell. There is also a woman from accounts who vapes in the stairwell.

There is the toilet, which he has used twice and will not use again, because there is something wrong about it and he cannot make himself do it a third time.

He wants an hour. That is all. Not a retreat, not a sabbatical, not a change of career. He wants one fixed point in the working day where he stops what he is doing and prays, the way his uncle did, who ran a shop for thirty one years and shut the door for eleven minutes every afternoon and never once explained himself to anybody.

He has been meaning to start for two years.

The reason he has not started is not laziness. It is that he keeps waiting to be in a situation where it would be possible without anybody noticing, and the honest truth, which he has never said out loud, is that he is afraid of the face somebody would make.

Not hostility. He could handle hostility. He is afraid of the small amused look, the very slight lift of an eyebrow, the sense of being filed.

So at one o'clock every day he eats a sandwich at his desk with a screen in front of him, and the hour goes past, and it has gone past about four hundred and eighty times.

He opened a window and kept the time

Let me put a man in front of you who had this problem in a form so much worse than yours that it is almost comic, and who solved it without a room.

The decree had gone out. Thirty days, no petition to any god or man except the king, and the penalty was not an eyebrow, it was a pit with animals in it. And Daniel had a hundred and twenty administrators actively looking for a reason to bring him down, which is a level of workplace observation nobody reading this has to deal with.

Now when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went into his house; and his windows being open in his chamber toward Jerusalem, he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime.Daniel 6:10

Four words at the end of that verse are the whole thing. As he did aforetime.

He did not increase it. He did not decrease it. He did not move it to a safer hour or find a discreet cupboard. He did what he had always done, at the times he had always done it, at a window that was already open, and the reason he could do that under a death sentence is that the rhythm was already there and he did not have to invent it in a crisis.

Hear this at your desk. You are not waiting on a room, and the written word is what tells me that, not my optimism. Scripture has a man keeping his hours at an open window in a hostile city, and the Holy Spirit who steadied him at that window is the same Spirit standing at one o'clock in an open plan office with forty desks in it.

Now, the eyebrow. Let me say the true thing about it, because you have never said it out loud.

It is not cowardice to mind being looked at. It is a human nervous system doing its job, and nothing written in Scripture calls that a sin, and the Holy Spirit is not disappointed in a man for having one. The thing you are afraid of is not persecution, it is a very small social cost, which is a much harder thing to be brave about than a large one, because there is nothing noble to hold on to.

But look again at what Daniel actually did. He did not make a speech. He did not announce a policy. He opened a window and knelt down in his own room and got on with a thing he had been doing for decades, and the whole confrontation was created by the people watching, not by him.

Nothing in that verse is performative. The visibility was a by product.

So here is what I want you to see, and it takes the whole weight off. You are not being asked to make a stand. The written word does not require you to be conspicuous, only to be constant, and the Spirit of God is not standing over you demanding a demonstration in front of forty desks.

You can keep an hour that nobody in that building ever notices.

Stand at a window with a cup of something at one o'clock. That is all it looks like from the outside. A man at a window. Nobody has ever asked anybody why they are standing at a window.

Say one sentence with your eyes open. That is a full and ancient act of prayer and it does not require a knee, a room, a door, or six minutes.

And hear this, because it is what will actually get you to Thursday. You have not lost four hundred and eighty days. Scripture never once bills a person for the years before they began, and the Spirit who has been patient with you for two years is not going to start the account with a debt in it. Today is not the four hundred and eighty first failure. It is the first day of the thing your uncle had.