The Half I Am Not Driving Yet

Ten past ten in the morning and he has finished for four hours.

The depot canteen has a machine that swallows the coins if you press two buttons at once, a television nobody is watching, and a table with a wobble in it that everybody knows about and nobody has ever fixed. He puts his bag on the seat beside him and his flask on the table and there are four hours in front of him.

The morning half is done. School run, hospital run, the man at the same stop who says the same thing about the weather every single day. He is back on at half two. There is nowhere to go and nothing to do with the gap, so he does what he always does with it.

He runs it.

He starts with the car, because it is due its test. If it fails, then the part. If the part, then that week. And from there it goes where it always goes, to the boiler, to the eldest's shoes, to the thing the dentist said needs doing, down and down and down, until he is sitting in a canteen at eleven in the morning watching a family he loves lose the roof over their heads, in full detail, with the wobble in the table under his elbow.

None of it has happened. Not one link in that whole chain has happened. He has driven the entire crash at speed with his eyes open, in a canteen, on a Tuesday, and he will drive it again tonight the moment the light goes off.

Then the tannoy goes. He stands up. He drives the second half.

That is you as well, or you would not have opened this. So let us talk about the half you are not driving yet.

Grace is not stored anywhere. It is issued.

Paul had a thing in his life that would not go. He asked God to take it away three times, and what came back was not the removal.

My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.2 Corinthians 12:9

Sit with the word sufficient for a second, because everything is in it. Sufficient is a present-tense word. It is measured against what is actually happening, in an actual day, to an actual person. It is not measured against a scenario.

And that is why the cupboard is always empty when you go and check it at eleven in the morning. You are reaching for the strength of a day that has not arrived, and it is not kept in advance, because God does not stockpile grace inside a person. He issues it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings it to the hour it lands in.

As thy days, so shall thy strength be.Deuteronomy 33:25

So hear this as finished and not as encouragement. You have today's strength today, all of it, in full, with nothing held back and nothing docked for the shape the week is in. That is not my idea about you, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit inside you is the one who brings it to the hour it is needed rather than to the hour you rehearse it.

Why you always come up short in the rehearsal

Here is what actually happens in those four hours, and it is worth looking at once, because it cannot be unseen afterwards.

You run tomorrow, and you run it with today's supply, because today's is the only one you have. Naturally you come up short. You were always going to come up short, because you are testing yourself against a day whose grace has not been issued yet, and Deuteronomy 33:25 ties the strength to the day it belongs to, and the Holy Spirit keeps that order exactly.

Then you read the shortfall as a forecast. You sit in a canteen and conclude, from the fact that you cannot carry it now, that you will not be carried then.

That conclusion is not true and it is not evidence about you. You are not weak because you cannot pre-live a crash. Nobody can. Lamentations 3:23 says His mercies are new every morning, and new every morning means not available the night before, and the Holy Spirit who wrote that line through a man sitting in an actual ruin is the same Spirit who is with you at that wobbling table.

I am not telling you nothing will go wrong. I do not know what next month holds and neither does anybody who has ever written you a hopeful sentence. What I am telling you is that God is already standing in whatever comes, and He is not going to meet you there having forgotten what He is like.

Your fear is not unbelief and I will not have it called that

You are not frightened because your faith is thin. You are frightened because there is nothing set aside and you can count, and counting is not a sin. The man who checks his tires before a shift is not a man of small faith, he is a man doing his job, and there is not one line in Scripture that calls that unbelief, nor one nudge of the Holy Spirit that would.

So nobody is asking you to stop planning. Planning is good and it is yours to do, and the article that tells a person in your position to stop thinking about it is written by somebody who has never had to.

But planning and rehearsing are two different animals, and the difference is a decision. Planning ends in one. You look at the thing, you decide what you can do, you do it, and it closes. The rehearsal never closes, because there is no decision anywhere in it. It just runs the film again, and every time it runs, the same wrong conclusion comes out of the end of it.

You have permission to stop the film, and it is not a permission I invented. Philippians 4:6 puts the anxious thing into God's hands by asking, which is a thing you do once and then stop doing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who guards the mind of a person who has handed it over.