I Cannot Make Myself Sit Down

You get about forty seconds and then you are up again.

Somebody says sit down and you sit down and something happens in your legs. A cup needs taking out. A thing needs moving that does not need moving. You have seen something across the room and it is now the reason you are standing.

By the end of the day you will have covered more ground than anybody in that house and you will not be able to name one conversation you were fully inside.

And the thing that troubles you is not the tiredness. It is that you cannot make yourself stay. Not will not. Cannot. You have tried, several times, and something in your chest gets tight at about the forty second mark, and standing up is what fixes it.

Let me say the first thing plainly. That is not laziness inverted and it is not a virtue either. It is a body that has learned that being in motion is safer than being still, and it has learned that somewhere, from something, and it is doing what it learned.

There is usually a reason. In a lot of men it goes back a long way, to a house where being useful was how you stayed out of trouble, or to a stretch of years where if you stopped moving the whole thing fell over. Whatever it was, the lesson took, and it is still running in a room where there is no longer any danger.

Come ye yourselves apart

There is a sentence Jesus says to men who have been working, and every word of it is doing something.

And he said unto them, Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while: for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat. (Mark 6:31, King James Version)

Come ye yourselves apart. Not: rest when this dies down. Apart is a place, and going apart is a movement you make on purpose, away from a thing that has not finished.

And look at the last clause, which explains why He said it. Many coming and going. There was no natural gap. The work was not going to produce one, and He did not wait for one, and He did not ask them to make one appear.

That is the exact situation in your house on that day. There is no natural gap. There never will be. The day does not contain a moment where everything is done, and you have been waiting for it since you were young.

You are able to go apart from a thing that has not finished, and it is written into Mark 6:31 that He sent them away in the middle of the coming and going. The written word puts the rest inside the busyness rather than after it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a real instruction for a man in a full house.

And note the verb He uses about the rest itself.

You have been given a while rather than a whole evening, and Mark 6:31 says rest a while as a measured and limited thing. Scripture does not ask for a day off, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a limited stop possible for a man who cannot manage an unlimited one.

Why the chair is the hard part

Let me be exact about what happens at forty seconds, because I think it has never been described to you.

Sitting down in a busy room is not restful. It is the opposite. In motion a man is unavailable and useful and nobody can start anything with him. Sitting, he is exposed: available for a conversation he did not choose, visible as a man doing nothing, and left alone with whatever a head does when it is not occupied.

So the chair is not a rest. The chair is a threat, and your body is quite sensibly removing you from it.

You were never failing to relax, and Scripture has Jesus name a place to go rather than a state of mind to achieve. Mark 6:31 says a desert place, which is a location, and the Holy Spirit is the one who explains a man's own chest to him after years of calling it restlessness.

And here is why every attempt has failed. You have been trying to sit down in the middle of the room, in an unlimited way, with no end point. That is the hardest possible version and it would defeat most people.

An open ended stop has no edge, so your body cannot see the end of it, so it treats it as an indefinite exposure and gets you out.

You have been attempting the hardest version of this and calling the failure a fault, and the written word describes a place and a duration rather than an attitude. Mark 6:31 gives both, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present with a man who has read his own body wrong for thirty years.

Decide the place and the length

So here is the assignment, and it has two halves and both are load bearing.

Decide now where you will stop and for how long, and tell one person the decision is made.

The where matters. Not the middle of the room. Somewhere slightly apart: the step, the truck, the end of the yard, the room where the coats are. Somewhere a man can be for a while without being available.

The how long matters just as much. Twelve minutes. Twenty. A number, decided in advance, so that your body can see the far end of it from the beginning.

You are able to stop in a place with an edge on it, and it is written into Mark 6:31 that He named both a place and a duration. The written word says apart and it says a while, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man sitting on a step with a number in his head.

And tell one person. Not to ask permission. Because a decision said out loud to another human being survives contact with a busy afternoon, and a private intention does not.

Tell somebody who will not make it a thing. Just: at about three I am going out to the truck for twenty minutes.

You are making a decision with an edge rather than a resolution about your character, and it has never once required you to want to sit still first. Mark 6:31 sends working men to a specific place for a limited time, and the Spirit of God is the one who goes with a man to the end of a yard.