The First Thing I Check

Six twelve in the morning, and the room is still the color of a bruise.

Her eyes are not open yet. Her arm is already moving. It goes over the edge of the bed to the little table where the phone charges, and her thumb knows the way without her, two taps and a swipe, and the screen throws that cold light up onto her chin, and she reads the number.

Then she lies back down and she says, out loud, in a voice thick with sleep, good morning, Lord.

She has done it in that order for eleven years.

She would tell you, and she would mean every word of it, that she trusts God with her life. She has a mother in a care home and a car with a noise in it and a job she is good at, and she prays about all three. She would tell you that the money is just money. She has said it at her own kitchen table. It is just a number, it is just a tool, it is just how we keep the lights on.

But watch what happens on a Tuesday when the number is healthy. She hums in the shower. She is generous with the woman at the bus stop who talks too long. Her prayers that day are wide and easy and full of thanksgiving, and she means those too.

And watch what happens on a Thursday when the number is thin. She is short with her son over a bowl left in the sink. She rehearses conversations with people who have not said anything to her yet. She prays that night with her jaw set, harder, better, longer, the way you work when you are trying to impress someone.

That is the part nobody sees, and it is the part that matters. It is not that she loves money. She would give you her last one and she has. It is that something in her checks with the balance first to find out what kind of day God is having.

She is not choosing between two things. She thinks she is, and that is why she keeps postponing it, because it feels like a decision she has not made yet and could make later, when things settle.

She is working two jobs with one heart, and one of them has never once paid her.

And now I am going to stop saying she.

Because you know what your hand does before your feet are on the floor. You know which app it is. And you have said, more than once, in a voice you use when you are being reasonable with yourself, that it is only a habit and it does not mean anything.

You are so tired. It is not the money that is tiring you. It is the arithmetic you have been doing in the background of every single day, the quiet running total that never switches off, the second boss you never applied to work for and cannot seem to hand in your notice to.

The word Jesus used is not the one you think

There is a sentence of Jesus about this and almost everybody has heard it and almost nobody has heard what is actually in it.

No one is able to serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will cling to the one and think little of the other. You cannot serve both God and money.Matthew 6:24

Start with the first three words, because they are the mercy in the sentence and everyone reads straight past them looking for the rule.

No one is able.

He does not say you should not. He does not say it is unwise, or unbalanced, or spiritually untidy. He says it cannot be done. Not by you, not by the most disciplined person you know, not by anyone who ever lived. And that means the exhaustion you have been carrying is not a character flaw. It is what a human being feels like when they are attempting something that was never on the menu.

You are not failing at a thing everybody else manages. That is not my kindness to you, it is the first three words of the verse itself, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who lets that land as relief rather than as one more rule you are behind on.

Now the word for serve. It is the word for a bond servant, someone whose whole life belongs to another. Not an employee with two contracts. A person who has one owner. Which is why divided service is not half service, and this is the whole hinge of it: half of nothing is nothing. You have not been giving God fifty percent and the number fifty percent. You have been maintaining a fiction, at real cost, in the early hours, on your own, for years.

And you are not divided at the root. The written word says God gives one heart and one way to those who are His, and the Spirit is the one who does that giving, so what has been wearing you out is the upkeep of a fiction rather than a split in the person you actually are.

And the tiredness is not yours to carry as a fault. The written word says His yoke is easy and His burden is light, 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.

And the word underneath the second master is older still. It comes from a root that means the thing you rely on. What you lean your weight against. So the rival was never the coins and never your salary and never the fact that you are good with a spreadsheet. The rival is the leaning.

Hear the rest of it, because this is where people put a burden on you that Jesus never put there. He does not tell you to have less. He does not say that the poor are nearer to Him or that a person with money in the account is further away. That is a different religion and it has hurt a lot of people. The number is not the sin and it is not the cure. A hand can hold a tool all day long. What it cannot do is hold two masters.

So this is not a message about giving anything up. It is about which hand you are leaning your weight on when you wake up.

And you already have one Master. Not once the leaning changes: the word says you are not your own, you were bought at a price, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit that this is settled ground rather than a target still ahead of you.

Money is a fine servant and it makes a hopeless master, because it cannot answer you when you call it at four in the morning, and God has never once been out of the room. That is the only comparison being made here. One of them can hold you. One of them cannot, and it has never claimed it could. You are the one who has been asking it to.