Whose Day It Is Before It Starts

Delphine wakes at twenty to five on the morning of the festival and the first thing she does is a headcount of everything that can go wrong.

Two hundred and forty covers. The marquee, which went up crooked and has been arguing with the wind since Thursday. The urn that trips the circuit if you run it with the fryer. Her brother, who is coming and who has not spoken properly to their mother in two years and who will be at table nine.

She lies there in the dark and she carries all of it before her feet are on the floor. That is the phrase her friend Yolande uses about her, and she uses it fondly and it is not entirely a compliment. Delphine carries the day before it has started.

She gets up. She makes coffee she will not drink. She goes out to the yard at ten past five, and the marquee is still standing and the sky is going the color it goes, and there is nobody there yet.

Yolande arrives at half five with the bread, which is early, and finds her standing in the middle of the yard doing absolutely nothing, which is unheard of.

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing," Delphine said. "That's the matter."

She had come out to start and there was nothing to start. The chairs come at seven. The fish comes at eight. She was standing in the middle of a day that had already begun without her and there was, for about forty minutes, literally nothing for her to do.

And Yolande, who is not a subtle woman, put the bread down on the trestle and said: "So whose day is it, then, if you haven't started it?"

Delphine still tells that story. She says it was the only time in fifteen years of running that festival that she went into a day rather than pushing it.

It did not make the day easier. The urn tripped the circuit. Her brother came and it was awkward for an hour and then it was not. The marquee held.

What changed was what she was carrying while it happened, and she says the difference was entirely made in a yard at ten past five with a woman holding a bread crate asking a question she had never once thought to ask.

You wake up carrying it as well. Whatever your version is, and it may be a lot smaller than a festival and it may be a lot heavier, you come into consciousness already holding the whole thing, and it has probably never occurred to you to ask whose day it is before you pick it up.

The Day Was Made Before Anybody Got Up

There is a line people sing at each other on happy occasions that is a great deal more load bearing than its reputation suggests.

"This is the day which the LORD hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it."Psalm 118:24

Hath made. Past tense, finished, before the sentence is spoken. The day is not something the singer is about to build. It is something already made and already handed over, and the only thing left for anybody to do with it is to be in it.

That psalm, incidentally, is not a fair weather song. It is full of being surrounded and pushed hard and nearly falling. The line arrives at the end of a long account of things having gone badly, which is exactly why it is worth anything at all.

You are walking into a day that was made rather than one you have to manufacture. Psalm 118 puts the making in the finished tense before anybody rejoices about anything, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line off a plaque and turns it back into what it was, which is a fact about ownership.

And that is the whole grammar of the first, which this site keeps coming back to. The first of a harvest is not what you produce. It is what arrives before the rest, so that everything after it follows something already named. The morning is that. The day is made, and the beginning of it is where you say so, and everything else in the day comes after that sentence instead of before it.

You have been handed this Tuesday rather than tasked with generating it. That is what the written word says about days, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that arrive in the shoulders and not just the head.

What Changes Is What You Are Holding

Now the honest part, because a woman with two hundred and forty covers is entitled to ask what practical difference this makes.

It does not change the fryer. The circuit still trips. The wind does what the wind does. This is not a technique for making a day go well, and anybody who tells you it is has sold you something.

What changes is what you are carrying while the day happens.

Delphine went into that festival having already said out loud, in an empty yard, that the day was not hers. And when the urn went at half eleven she dealt with the urn, and she did not deal with the urn plus the entire weight of the whole thing resting on whether she personally was equal to it.

That is not a small difference. That is most of the difference there is.

You were never the one holding this up. It is written that He upholds all things by the word of His power, which is a sentence about load bearing and not about atmosphere, and His Spirit is the one who is actually carrying the parts of today you have been trying to carry from bed.

And say the guard clearly, because this is where a freeing thing turns into a heavy one. Nothing on this page is a requirement. There is no method here, no words that have to be used, no time it has to happen by, no minimum and nothing routed to anyone anywhere. If tomorrow you wake and carry the whole thing from the first second the way you always have, you are exactly as much His at the end of it, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this off the shelf where techniques go.