Teach Me To Count This One

The hour is not what costs him. He has done the arithmetic on this and it is not close.

What happens is this. He sets the time aside, properly, and he means it, and then it goes. Sometimes it goes to something reasonable and sometimes it goes to nothing at all, and either way at the end of it he is standing there and the time is gone and he did not do the thing.

That is the hour. And the hour, honestly, is survivable.

What is not survivable is the six days afterward. Because he then carries it. Not dramatically, and not in a way anybody would notice, but there is a low hum in him for most of a week that says: you did not do it, again, and you are the kind of man who says he will and then does not.

And here is the part that has begun to interest him, in the cold way a man gets interested in his own machinery at forty-four. During those six days he does not pray. Not because he decides not to. Because the low hum makes the approach feel absurd, and so he stays a polite distance away until enough time has passed that he can start again clean.

One wasted hour. Six lost days. Every month, for years.

If your arithmetic looks like that too, come and sit down under the vine. Nothing is going to be counted in here.

The counting prayer is not about regret

There is a psalm men like him reach for at exactly the wrong angle, and I want to turn it round, because it is one of the most useful sentences in the Bible for somebody with a low hum.

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.Psalm 90:12

He has always read that as an instruction to take stock. To be sober about the waste. To look at the ledger of his life and be appropriately serious about the gaps in it, which he is extremely good at and which is why the hum exists.

But look at the second half, because it is the whole purpose clause and it tells you what the counting is for. That we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

It is forward facing. The point of numbering the days is not to grieve the spent ones. It is to know that days are finite and therefore to put your heart into something worth putting it into, today, which is a thing you can only do with the day you are actually in.

A man spending six days being sorry about an hour is doing the exact opposite of this psalm. He is numbering his days in order to be sad about them, and the psalm asks him to number them in order to spend the next one well.

You have a psalm here that is pointed forward, and it was never handed to you as a tool for regret. Psalm 90:12 is where that sits, in a purpose clause almost nobody reads out loud, and the same Spirit who moved Moses to write it is the one who turns a sober man around to face the right way.

The hum is not conviction, and knowing the difference is worth years

Now let me name the thing directly, because it will keep costing him six days a month until somebody does.

Conviction from God is specific, it is about a thing rather than about you, it arrives with the way back attached, and it is over quickly. It says: that. Come here. Done.

The low hum is none of those. It is not specific, it is about him rather than about an hour, it offers no way back, and it lasts six days. And most importantly, it moves him away from God rather than toward Him, which is the opposite direction from everything conviction has ever done in the history of the world.

That is the test and it is a good one. Whatever moves you toward the room is from God. Whatever keeps you at a polite distance until you feel presentable is not, however religious it sounds, and it has sounded very religious in him for a long time.

You are not being convicted during those six days, and you were never once being corrected by that hum. That sentence belongs to Romans 2:4, where it is the goodness of God that leads a person to repentance, and His Spirit does not use a week of low shame as an instrument.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is not going to be one.

And for a man who is already running a private scorecard, one more thing plainly. Nothing on this site becomes a thing to succeed or fail at. If any of this starts to feel like another performance to fall short of, put it down, and the putting down is not a failure either.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your wife is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is ordinary courtesy. None of it fails anything.

You have never been one step behind anybody, and you were not behind in any of the years the hum was running. It is written into 2 Corinthians 8:12, where God receives on the basis of what a person actually has, and the Holy Spirit carries that into a man who has been keeping his distance until he felt presentable.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.