Stood Down Again

Twenty past six in the yard and the rain has properly set in. Not the drizzle they work through. The other kind, coming sideways off the top field, and everybody standing in the line knows what is coming before the ganger opens his mouth.

He says it anyway. Nothing today. Try tomorrow.

She walks back to the caravan with her hood up and her waterproofs squeaking and she does not say a word to anybody, because there is nothing left to say that has not been said all week.

Inside, she puts the kettle on out of habit and stands looking at the little window with the rain running down it.

And she hears herself say it. Out loud, to the glass. Go on then. Rain on the whole lot of it. Rain it into the ground.

Then a second one comes, quieter, and it is this one she cannot get out of her head afterwards, because she was not making a point. She meant it. You know exactly what I need and You are doing this anyway.

She stands there with the kettle rattling. She has belonged to God since she was nineteen. She has never in her life said a thing like that to Him.

And what frightens her is not that she said it. It is that she is not sorry.

You have one of those in you as well, and you have been keeping it out of your prayers.

What went hard, and why it went hard

Let me say the obvious thing first, because it does not get said often enough and it should be said by somebody who is not going to follow it with a but. There has been a hard run, it went on a long time, and it wore something down. That is not a character flaw. That is what long pressure does to a human being, and it does it to the good ones.

The weather decides your week. Not you, not your effort, not how early you got up or how hard you went at it. The sky does, and it does it without any reference whatsoever to you, and living like that season after season teaches a person something about being at the mercy of things. Staying soft through it is not a small ask.

So here is what I want settled before we go one step further. You are not in trouble. Not with God, not on this page, not for what came out of your mouth at the window with the kettle going. Isaiah 42:3 says a bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a fact standing in your caravan rather than a nice line about somebody in a book.

And as he lay and slept under a juniper tree, behold, then an angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat.1 Kings 19:5

That is God's opening move on a man who had just told Him he had had enough and would like to die. Not a syllable about the attitude. Bread on the coals, water by his head, and go back to sleep, and then bread again, because the journey was too great for him.

He kept a bitter woman's words in the book

If bitterness disqualified people, the Bible would be a much shorter book.

Ruth 1:20 has Naomi arriving home and telling the whole town not to call her Naomi any more. Call me Mara, she says, which means bitter, because the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me. She says it in public, about God, by name, and nobody in the passage corrects her, and it was kept exactly as she said it.

Job 7:11 has a man saying I will not refrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul. Then at the far end of the book, in Job 42:7, God turns to the friends who had spent the whole time correcting him and tells them they have not spoken of Him what is right, as His servant Job has.

Read that twice, because it carries weight. The man who complained bitterly is the one God says spoke rightly, and the ones who tidied him up are the ones who got the rebuke. You are safe to be honest here, and that is not my kindness talking, it is what Scripture did with a bitter man, and the same Spirit who kept Job's complaint in the record is in you while you read it.

He is softening it, and He is not asking you to do it first

Here is what does not work, and it has probably already been tried. Deciding to be less bitter. Standing in a caravan doorway resolving to have a better attitude about the rain, which lasts roughly until the next stood down morning.

Softening is not something a person does to themselves by effort. Ezekiel 36:26 has God saying I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh, and the pronouns in that verse are the whole point. He does it. He does not issue instructions for it and then stand back to see how you get on.

And He is doing it in you now, without waiting on an apology and without asking you to feel differently about the weather. You have His Spirit inside you, and Romans 5:5 says the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given unto us, and shed abroad is not a careful measure. It is a spill.

Nobody here is going to ask you to repent of being tired. There is nothing to repent of in a heart that went hard under weather it never controlled, and if there ever were anything, it would be His business and He has not raised it.