Four Days From the Song

The second shift starts at ten and it is quiet until about half past midnight and then it is not quiet again until four.

She is on the third floor. Wednesday.

Sunday morning there was a song about halfway through the service that went somewhere, and she was in it, and she has not been in one like that for a while and she noticed at the time and was glad.

Deneen is fifty one.

It is twenty past one on Wednesday morning and she is standing at a linen cart in a corridor and she cannot find one thread of it.

Not distressed. That would be an overstatement and she is not a woman who overstates. She is tired in the particular way of somebody four days into a stretch, and the building is doing its night noises, and the song might as well have happened to a different person in a different year.

She has been doing this arithmetic for a long time. One morning in seven, and the other six spent down, and no obvious way for it to work otherwise given the shifts and given her life.

If your week takes it out of you like that, this is written for you. And I want to give you one phrase, because it names whose concerns are actually being talked about.

That which concerneth me

Here is the line.

The LORD will perfect that which concerneth me.

Now, that which concerneth me. That is a phrase about ownership of a worry.

The things that concern a person are the things they carry. It is the mental list. It is what runs when the corridor is quiet, and for most people it is the same four or five items in a rotation that they know by heart without ever having written it down.

And the verse says God will finish those.

Not: God will do His own work regardless of what you are worrying about. Not: your concerns are misplaced and here is what actually matters. He will perfect the things that concern you. The list itself. The rotation. The four or five items.

You have your own list named in that verse as the thing He is going to finish. Psalm 138:8 says that which concerneth me and takes the person's own concerns as the object, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written transfer and makes it real in a person, so this does not rest on how much of it lands in a corridor at one in the morning.

And that is worth a great deal at twenty past one, because there is a particular loneliness in a mental list. It runs on its own. Nobody else has access to it. It is not the sort of thing that comes up in conversation and it would sound strange to describe, and so a person carries it in a corridor at night entirely by themselves.

The verse reaches into that specific thing and says: those. Those are the ones I am going to finish.

You have somebody who named your list rather than replacing it with a better one. It is written with the person's own concerns as the object of the verb, and His Spirit is the one carrying a written transfer into a life, which is why it holds standing at a linen cart at one in the morning.

Perfect is a finishing word

Now the verb, and it is a strong one.

Will perfect.

The word behind it means to complete, to bring to an end, to finish off entirely. It is not about improvement and it is not about polish. It is the word for something being brought all the way to its conclusion.

So the promise is not that God will help with the list, or take the edge off it, or make it easier to carry. It is that He will bring those items to their end.

And notice the tense. Will perfect. It is a statement about what is going to happen rather than a description of what is happening now, and that matters at one in the morning, because at one in the morning nothing appears to be happening at all and a person can reasonably conclude from that appearance that nothing is.

The verse does not describe visible progress. It states an outcome.

You have an outcome stated rather than progress shown. Scripture uses the word for bringing all the way to completion and puts it in the future, and the same Spirit at work in that psalm is the one testifying inside a person now.

Something belongs here in the middle where nobody can skip it. If the list has been getting longer, if a night shift has stopped being tiring and started being something heavier, if the nights have been getting long or the thinking has traveled out past the ache toward wishing to be gone, get a person alongside you. Talk to your doctor. Sit down with a counselor. If today is a dark one, call or text 988 or your local crisis line and let another human being be with you in it. That is not a lesser road than prayer and it is not a fault in anybody's faith. God has always worked through people, and one sitting across from you is part of what He is doing rather than an alternative to it.

Four days is not a decay rate

Now the thing this category exists for, and I want it plain in a corridor at night.

Four days is not a decay rate.

The arithmetic has been treating Sunday as a charge and the week as a discharge, and calculating a rate from that, and drawing a conclusion about a life from the rate. And there is no such rate. There is no passage anywhere in Scripture that measures a believer by how long a Sunday lasts, and if there were it would reward the people who work days and sleep nights and have quiet weeks, and nobody has ever wanted to write that doctrine down.

And a Wednesday at twenty past one has canceled nothing. It has not moved one thing that God declared, because a state that God declared is not the kind of object that runs down over four days.

The song is not gone. Something in you cannot access it, which is a completely different fact, and it is a fact about tiredness and about a body at one in the morning and not about your standing.

You are in the same state at twenty past one on Wednesday that you were in at eleven on Sunday. Psalm 138:8 states an outcome for a person's own concerns without measuring the interval, and the Spirit takes what is written and makes it living in a body.

And I am not going to tell you Wednesday starts feeling like Sunday. On a second shift at one in the morning it almost certainly will not, and that is not a defect in you and it is not a defect in the shift.

You are clean right now with nothing findable in you at all, and the not finding has never once been a witness. It is written and it is undertaken, and it is His Spirit rather than the strength of your agreement who makes an undertaken thing real in a body.