He Said Rest Before He Said Anything Else

Gethin's day ends at about ten past nine and he has got into a habit of starting with sorry.

He is not a religious man in any way he would describe as impressive. He does not go to much. He talks to God on the back step with a mug, which he started doing in the second year of his wife's illness and has not stopped doing in the fourth.

The step faces west. There is a shed and a lilac that needs cutting back and next door's cat.

And what he says, more or less every night, when he finally sits down, is: sorry.

Sorry that this is the first time today. Sorry that I have got nothing to say. Sorry that I am only here because I have run out of things to do and this is what is left of me.

He said it to his friend Rhodri in a parking lot, embarrassed, because Rhodri had asked how he was and had not accepted the first answer.

He said: "I feel like I'm turning up at the end of the day with the scrapings."

And Rhodri, who is not a clever man and has a way of going straight to the middle of something, said: "Who told you He wanted the good bit?"

Gethin has not been able to put that down.

He said afterwards that in four years of that step and that mug, he had assumed something he had never once examined, which was that God was waiting for a better version of him at a better hour, and that everything he had actually brought had been a poor substitute for the visit he should have made when he had something in him.

Four years of apologizing to Somebody who had, as far as Gethin can now tell, never once asked for anything different.

You may start with sorry as well. Sorry it is late. Sorry there is not more of me. Sorry this is the leftovers. And nobody has ever asked you the question Rhodri asked in a parking lot, which is who told you that.

The First Thing He Said To Them Was Rest

There is a moment in Mark where the disciples come back from a long, hard, successful stretch of work, and it is worth watching what Jesus says to them first.

"And he said unto them, Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while: for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat."Mark 6:31

Come and rest.

That is the opening line. Not: tell me everything. Not: there is more to do. Not: you should have paced yourselves better. He looks at a group of people who have been going flat out and who have not managed to eat, and the first thing out of His mouth is an instruction to stop.

And Mark, who does not usually explain things, adds the reason in the same sentence: they had not had time to eat. That detail is in the Bible. Somebody noticed that these people had not had a proper meal.

You are being looked at by Somebody who notices when a person has not eaten. Mark 6 puts rest before debrief and never once puts a reprimand anywhere near it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old scene on a lakeshore and sets it down on a back step at ten past nine.

And notice what is not in that verse. There is no assessment of how well they did. There is no comment on the quality of what they brought back. He deals with the state of them first, and He deals with it by feeding them and taking them away from the crowd for a bit.

You have been received before you have been examined, and that order is written into how He handles tired people every time. That is what the written word does with exhaustion, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that arrive on a step as relief rather than as an idea about a Gospel.

What You Have Is Not A Substitute For Something Better

Now the part that matters most, and this article is written for one specific kind of person.

If you care for somebody, or you work nights, or you have small children, or you have a body that takes most of your energy just to run, then you are not bringing God a reduced version of a proper Christian life.

You are bringing what there is. Those are different things and the difference is enormous.

A reduced version implies a full version you are failing to produce. What is actually happening is that a person is arriving with their real day in their hands, at the real end of it, and that is not a lesser offering, because there is no other offering. There is no shadow Gethin somewhere with more in him who is the real one.

You are not standing next to a better version of yourself. It is written that He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, which is a sentence about Somebody who has factored in the whole of a human being including the tiredness, and His Spirit is the one who has been on that step every night of the four years.

And say the guard, because this is where a kind thing can turn into a demand. Nothing on this page is a requirement. No hour, no length, no words, no energy level, no proportion of anything, and nothing routed to any person or work at all. If tonight you fall asleep before you say anything, you are exactly as much His asleep in the chair, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this from becoming one more thing on somebody who is already carrying a house.