An Hour Is Not Something You Earn

Answer this one before you think about it too hard.

What kind of week would you have to have before you would let yourself take an hour?

Most people can answer that immediately, which tells you the standard is already written down somewhere in there. A week where the house was under control. A week where nobody was let down. A week where you were on top of it.

Now look at the last two years and count how many weeks like that there have been.

That is the whole problem, and it is arithmetic rather than character.

If the hour is a reward, then it has an entry requirement, and the entry requirement is a kind of week that happens about twice a year and never when you notice it happening. So the hour is available in theory and unavailable in practice, permanently, and you have been waiting for a qualifying week the way a person waits for good weather in a country that does not get any.

And here is the sharper end of it. The weeks where you would most want that hour are exactly the weeks that disqualify you from it. The rule is built so that it fires hardest when the need is greatest.

That is not a rule anybody would design on purpose. It is one that assembles itself, quietly, out of a very reasonable idea about earning things.

A shadow is cast by something already there

There is a short line in Colossians about religious days that turns out to be about this exactly.

Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ. (Colossians 2:17, King James Version)

Paul has just been talking about days. Holy days, new moons, sabbath days, the whole apparatus of appointed rest, and he says they are a shadow, and the body is of Christ.

Now think about what a shadow is, because the picture is doing real work.

A shadow is not a promise of a thing that might turn up. A shadow is proof that something is already there. You cannot have a shadow without an object standing in the light, and the shadow arrives at the same moment the object does, not later.

So when Scripture calls the appointed rest a shadow, it is not saying it was unimportant. It is saying it was cast by something. And the something has a name, and He is not a reward at the end of a good week. He is a Person, and He is already here.

You are standing beside the substance and not waiting for it, and the rest has never once been a prize that arrives after a qualifying week. Colossians 2:17 calls the days a shadow of a body that already exists, and it is the Holy Spirit who moves a thing out of the future tense inside somebody who has been waiting on it for years.

Let no man judge you, including you

Now the sentence just before it, because the two belong together and the first one is doing the guarding.

Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days.

Let no man judge you.

That is aimed outward, at people who would make rules about somebody else's rest. And it has been read that way for two thousand years and rightly.

But there is nobody outside doing that to you. Nobody in your house has told you that you have to earn an hour. Nobody at your church has set an entry requirement on it.

The only person applying that standard is the one reading this, which means the sentence has to be turned around and pointed inward before it does you any good at all.

You are permitted to stop judging yourself in this, and no rule about qualifying weeks has ever come from anybody outside you. Colossians 2:17 sets the substance above every rule about days. The Spirit of God is the one who can take a standard off a person when the person holding it is themselves.

And I want to say the fair thing, because earning is not a character flaw and I am not going to call it one. Somewhere, being on top of things was how you kept a household safe, or how you knew you were doing right by people. That is not vanity. That came from love and it probably worked.

You are not being told the earning was wrong, and the instinct behind it has never once been anything but care. The written word replaces a shadow with a body rather than replacing a person's diligence with laziness, and His Spirit is entirely able to lift a requirement without lowering a standard anybody actually needs.

Take it in a bad week, on purpose

Now the practical part, and it is the opposite of what you would plan.

Take the hour in a bad week.

Not in a good one. Deliberately, in a week that is going badly, in the middle, before anything improves and while the evidence is still against you.

That is not a stunt. It is the only way to find out which arrangement is really in force, because an hour taken in a good week proves nothing at all. It could be a reward. It is exactly what a reward would look like.

An hour taken on a Wednesday in a week where the house is a mess and two things have gone wrong cannot be a reward, because nothing has been earned. It can only be a gift, and taking it is the one experiment that settles it.

It will feel wrong. Expect that and do not treat it as information, because the feeling is produced by the old rule and the old rule is what is being tested.

You are able to take it in the worst week you have had this year, and the qualifying week has never once been coming. Colossians 2:17 puts the body ahead of the shadow rather than after it. The same Spirit who inspired that line is well able to steady somebody taking an hour they are certain they have not earned.