Buying Back Saturday

Loretta has been trying to buy peace back on a Saturday for about nine years, and she has never once got a full one.

It is a serious operation. There is a plan for it. The Saturday is protected the way people protect a wedding day: nothing scheduled, phone in the drawer by lunchtime, the good coffee, the long walk if the weather allows, and she has been known to be short with people who put things in it.

And it does not work.

She could not tell you why for a long time. She thought she was doing it wrong. She read things about it. She tried getting up earlier and she tried getting up later, she tried the walk first and the coffee first, and one whole autumn she tried adding Sunday afternoon as well, and every version of it produced the same thing, which is a woman lying in bed on Saturday night not rested.

What she worked out, eventually, sitting on her own porch with a cup gone cold, was that she was not failing at resting.

She was trying to buy back on one day something she had spent five days selling.

And you cannot buy that back. Not with a good Saturday and not with three of them. That is not a rest problem and no amount of technique touches it, because the thing she was short of was not hours off.

From Monday to Friday, Loretta serves two. She would tell you God with her whole chest and she would mean it, and she prays in the mornings and she is not fooling anybody, least of all herself. And she also runs a second set of considerations underneath everything, all day, every day, about how it is going, whether there is enough, what happens if, and that second set never once stops for prayer and has never taken a single day off in nine years.

Saturday does not touch it. Saturday is not even in the same conversation. She takes her hands off the work for one day and the other master does not notice, because it was never the work it had hold of.

Now hear me before you start scolding yourself in your own kitchen.

Loretta is not lazy and she is not faithless, and she does not need a better system. There is nothing wrong with a protected Saturday. It is a good practice and she should keep it, and if anybody tells you that resting is a failure of trust you may safely stop listening to them.

That is not the problem here.

The problem is that a day off is a remedy for tiredness, and what she has is not tiredness. What she has is the ordinary cost of holding two masters in one week and calling it one life.

You have your own version. There is something you spend the week paying out and then try to recover on a day, and it never quite comes back, and you have been assuming that is a fault in the way you rest.

Nobody is calling you undisciplined. You may be the most disciplined person on your road.

You have just been trying to buy something back on Saturday that was not sold on a Saturday.

He does not offer a day. He offers a yoke.

Everybody knows the invitation and almost nobody notices what is actually being handed over.

Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.Matthew 11:29

He does not say take a day off. He does not say put the phone in the drawer, and He does not offer a scheme. He offers a yoke, which is a working object. It is what you wear while you are pulling.

Which tells you where He thinks the rest lives, and it is not in the gap between the working days. It is inside them.

And hear what is already true over you. You are not short of rest, you are short of one master, and the second one is already unemployed. That is not my phrasing to be clever: the written word says plainly that no one can serve two, so the arrangement you have been running was never real, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman on a porch with a cold cup.

And His yoke is already fitted to you. Not once you have rested properly, and not once the week improves: the word says His yoke is easy and His burden is light, and that word for easy means well fitting, made for the shoulders it is on, and the Spirit is the one who lets a person feel the difference between a burden that fits and a fiction that has to be held up.

Nobody is coming for your carefulness

Now I want to be plain, because this is where a message like this starts telling a sensible woman to be careless in the name of trust.

Nobody here is telling you to stop thinking about whether there is enough. Wisdom is not the rival. Scripture praises the woman who looks well to her household and never once calls her anxious for doing it, and if I told you that planning is unbelief I would be talking nonsense and you would be right to shut the page.

And nobody here is telling you that a smaller amount would fix this. That is the same error stood on its head. Going without on purpose still makes the amount the center of the story, and the amount has never been the center. A woman with plenty is not standing further away from God than a woman with little, in either direction.

The question is not whether you think about it.

The question is which of the two has been deciding how the week feels, because one of them has, and the arrangement in which they both do has never existed anywhere.

And you already belong to the one who does not need a Saturday to reach you. Not once you have got the rhythm right: the word says you are not your own, you were bought at a price, and it is the Spirit who bears witness with your spirit that this is a fact and not a target.

The other one was never paying you anyway. It has never handed anybody a single hour back. The written word says the one who loves silver is not satisfied with silver, and the Spirit is entirely able to make a woman feel the truth of that without taking one thing off her to prove it.