The Month in the Back Pocket

The alley behind the restaurant is warm because the extractor is still going, and he sits on an upturned crate with his apron rolled under his arm and lets the noise of the fan be the only thing for a while.

Sunday close. Front of house are still stacking chairs. Somebody inside drops a tray of cutlery and everybody cheers.

He takes the little book out of his back pocket. It is not a diary the way people mean when they say diary. It is a notebook with a bent corner where he writes what he worked, what he was owed, who covered who. It is the most honest document he owns and he has never once thought of it that way.

He flips back, idly, because the fan is loud and there is nothing else to do until his ride comes. D for double, circled. D. D. Off. D. A Thursday with nothing on it at all, which he cannot account for. A birthday written at the top of a week with a line through it, because he took the shift.

Halfway down the second page, in his own handwriting, on the sixth and again on the nineteenth: Call Mom.

Not crossed off either time.

He sits with the book open on his knee and the fan going and there is no drama in him about it. He is not appalled. It is simply where the month went, laid out in his own hand, accurate to the hour, and he could tell you the reason for every single line of it.

And here is the part that stops him. It has never crossed his mind to show this page to God. Not because he was hiding it. Because it never occurred to him that a shift schedule was the kind of thing God would want.

You have a page like that. Not a confession, and nothing anybody would gasp at. Just the accurate shape of where your actual life goes, which you could produce from memory in about ninety seconds, and which you have never once said out loud in the direction of God.

He was on every shift in that book

I want to start where the psalm starts, because David does something in it that almost nobody does with their own life.

He describes it in detail, out loud, to God. Not the highlights. The route.

Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.Psalm 139:3

Compassest is a farming word. It is what you do to grain: you sift it, you winnow it, you go through the whole of it. And look at what the psalm puts on either side of that sifting. Path and lying down. Going out and going to bed. That is a merism, two ends naming everything in between, and what it means in the language of a working life is: your commute and your sleep and every hour bolted between them.

Not the spiritual parts. The route.

Acquainted with all my ways. Not informed about. Acquainted with, the way you are acquainted with a street because you have walked it in every kind of weather.

You are already fully known at the address you actually live at, and He has walked every inch of it. That is not a compliment I am paying you. It is written in Psalm 139:3 and it was written by a man doing an honest inventory of his own ordinary movements, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been on the route with you, in the alley, on the late bus, on every one of those circled doubles.

Being seen is not the same as being audited

Now the fear underneath, because it is real and it is specific and I am not going to pretend it is small.

The reason the page has never been said out loud is not shame, exactly. It is the assumption that full visibility produces a list. That if God really looked at where the month went, the next thing out of the exchange would be an itemized account, ranked, with the worst bits at the top, and you would be asked what you intend to do about each one.

So look at what actually happens to David when he is fully seen. He does not produce a list. He does not brace. He gets to the end of describing his own tracked, sifted, thoroughly known life and says such knowledge is too wonderful for me, and then he tests the thing to its limit.

Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.Psalm 139:7-8

Read that as a shift worker reads a rota. Wherever the bed gets made, that is where He is. And notice what His presence in a place is never doing in that verse. It is not ruling on the place. It is keeping company in it.

You have been accompanied, not inspected, and the accompanying has been going on the whole time. Psalm 139 is the ground for that and the Holy Spirit is the presence the psalm is naming, and He did not arrive in your month to grade it.

And I will say one plain thing here before we go on. If the honest look at the month has turned into something heavier than honest, if it has started telling you the month is the verdict on you and there is no point, then tell one real person tonight, out loud, and let them stay with you. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour; anywhere else, your local emergency number or crisis line. That is not a detour around God. That is how He has always sent help, through somebody who shows up. Then come back and finish the page.

One honest thing, and no promise on the end of it

So here is what I am asking for, and here is what I am carefully not asking for.

Not the list. There is no version of this where you go through the little book line by line and read it into the air. A list is a thing you produce for a tribunal, and there is no tribunal, and building one out of your own shift schedule is not honesty. It is just a smaller courtroom with you doing all the jobs in it.

One thing. One accurate sentence about where your time actually goes. The kind of sentence you would say to a friend on a crate in an alley, not the kind you would submit.

And then, and this is the part that will fight you, do not attach a promise to the end of it. Do not say and I am going to change that. The moment a promise goes on the end, the honest thing turns into a plea bargain, and you have gone back to trading. God did not come to your address for a settlement offer. He came because you live there.

You have the right to say a true thing to God with nothing on the end of it, and to be received exactly as you are when you say it. That is written in the psalm that walks your route with you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a sentence like that, and He has never needed a promise stapled to it to take it seriously.