I Am Scoring The Day In My Head

It started at about six and it has not stopped.

Not thinking about the day. Reviewing it. There is a difference and you know exactly what it is.

You are going through it conversation by conversation. The thing you said to your brother in law at about two, which was fine, and which you have now examined eleven times from four angles. The moment with the person by the door, where you could have said something and did not. The stretch in the afternoon where you were not really listening and you think it showed.

And each one gets a verdict. And the verdicts are not generous.

Here is what I want to point out first, and it is a question rather than a comfort.

Who is sitting on this court?

Because there is a judge, and there is a prosecution, and there is apparently no defense at all, and the whole proceeding is being conducted by a man who has had six hours sleep and is on his own in a kitchen at half past six in the morning.

That is not a reliable tribunal by any standard you would accept anywhere else in your life.

Who shall lay any thing to the charge

There is a question in Romans that is framed exactly as a legal challenge, and it is worth reading as one.

Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifieth. (Romans 8:33, King James Version)

Who shall lay any thing. It is a courtroom question, asked as a challenge, meaning: name the party with standing to bring this.

And the answer is given immediately and it is not a reassurance about how well anybody did. It is a jurisdictional answer. It is God that justifieth. The verdict is already entered by the only party with the authority to enter one, and therefore the case cannot be reopened by anybody else.

Including you.

That is the part that almost nobody applies to themselves. A man will accept that nobody else may bring a charge and will then spend a morning bringing one.

You are not a party with standing in that court, and it is written into Romans 8:33 that the justifying belongs to God and the question is who else could possibly charge. The written word closes the matter by jurisdiction rather than by argument, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that apply to a kitchen at half past six.

And notice what it does not do. It does not say the day went well.

You are able to have got several things wrong and still not be on trial, and Romans 8:33 never once claims the conduct was faultless. Scripture settles who may bring a charge rather than reviewing the evidence, and the Spirit of God is the one who tells a man the difference between a verdict and an assessment.

What the review is actually for

Now let me be honest about the audit, because being told simply to stop would be useless to a man like this.

It has a purpose and the purpose is control.

If you can find the error, then the error was yours, and if it was yours then next year it can be prevented. That is the logic and it is not stupid. It is the same logic you would use on anything that went wrong at work, and it works there.

It does not work here, because the material is other people, and the outcomes being graded were never yours to produce. Whether your brother in law was in a good mood is not a variable you control. Whether a conversation went somewhere is not a thing you can engineer.

You have been holding yourself to a standard nobody could meet, and a court has never once been the right room for a review of other people’s moods. Romans 8:33 asks who shall lay any thing to the charge of God’s elect, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a man out of a proceeding where he is the only defendant available.

So the audit finds fault, because an audit always finds fault, and then assigns it to the only party present, which is you.

You have been auditing outcomes that were never yours to produce, and the written word puts the whole matter of charges into a jurisdictional question rather than a performance review. Romans 8:33 asks who shall lay any thing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a man out of a court that has no defense in it.

And here is the second thing, which is the one that costs you. The review does not end. It cannot. There is always another conversation to examine, and by about eleven you will not be reviewing the day any more; you will be reviewing yourself, in general, going back years.

Every man who does this knows exactly how that escalation runs, and nobody talks about it.

You were never going to reach the end of it, and Scripture closes the question with a verdict already entered rather than with an argument that could be won. Romans 8:33 says it is God that justifieth, and the Spirit of God is the one who ends a proceeding that cannot end on its own.

Adjourn it and use your hands

So here is the assignment, and it has two parts because the first one alone will not hold.

Say out loud that the review is over, and then go and do something with your hands for twenty minutes.

Out loud, because a decision made silently inside the same head that is running the court is not a decision, it is another submission to the court.

Something plain. The review is over. Or: this case is closed. In whatever words a man like you would actually use.

You are able to close a proceeding rather than win it, and it has never once required you to reach a favorable verdict first. Romans 8:33 settles it by asking who has standing rather than by reviewing conduct, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man saying six words out loud in a kitchen.

And then the hands, immediately, because saying it will not hold on its own for more than about four minutes.

Twenty minutes of something physical and slightly absorbing. Not a task you can do while thinking. Something with a small amount of attention in it: a repair, sorting a drawer, anything outside in the cold.

The court cannot sit while the hands are occupied. That is not a spiritual principle; it is just how a head works, and it is the reason men in your position have always gone out to the garage.

You are occupying the room the court was sitting in, and the written word puts the case beyond reopening by anybody at all. Romans 8:33 makes the verdict already final, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a man in a garage for twenty deliberate minutes.