I Know Exactly How It Goes

You could write the schedule out on the back of an envelope and be right within about fifteen minutes.

Who arrives first. Which one is late and what the reason will be. The forty minutes where it is genuinely good, early on, before anybody has had time to remember anything. The subject that comes up at the table. Which two people go quiet. The hour after the meal where it goes slack and somebody says the thing they say every year.

Thirty years of the same afternoon, and you have got so accurate about it that you have stopped even being disappointed. Disappointment requires an expectation that was not met. You have no unmet expectations left. You have a forecast.

And there is a particular kind of tiredness that comes with that, which nobody talks about because it does not sound like suffering. It sounds like wisdom. It sounds like a man who knows his own family, which you do.

But here is what I have watched it do. A man who can predict a day stops arriving at it. He arrives at his own prediction. He walks in already at four in the afternoon, already past the difficult part, already holding the whole shape of it, and so he is never actually in the good forty minutes either, because he is standing in the hour after them the entire time.

You have not lost the day to conflict. You have lost it to accuracy.

In the day of adversity consider

There is a verse in Ecclesiastes written by a man who had seen everything twice, and it does something odd with a hard day.

In the day of prosperity be joyful, but in the day of adversity consider: God also hath set the one over against the other, to the end that man should find nothing after him. (Ecclesiastes 7:14, King James Version)

In the day of adversity, consider. That is the instruction, and it is a strange one. Not endure. Not fix. Not brace. Consider.

Consider is the word a man uses when he stops in the middle of something and actually looks at it. It is an act of attention, and attention is precisely the thing a forecast removes, because nobody looks hard at what has already been predicted.

And then the last clause, which is the honest one: to the end that man should find nothing after him. Which is to say, so that nobody can work out in advance how it goes. Solomon, of all people, sets it down plainly: the point of the arrangement is that you do not get to know.

You are not actually in possession of how this goes, and it is written into Ecclesiastes 7:14 that the not knowing is by design rather than by accident. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a relief to a man rather than an insult to thirty years of hard won accuracy.

That is the first thing and it goes carefully, because your forecast is not stupid. It is built out of evidence.

You have thirty years of real evidence and still no verdict on the afternoon ahead, and Scripture puts a limit on what a man can find out about what is coming. Ecclesiastes 7:14 says consider rather than predict, and the Spirit of God is the one who gets a man to look at a day he has already decided about.

What accuracy costs a man

Let me put this plainly, because you would not want it dressed up.

Your prediction is probably right. I am not going to flatter you by pretending your family are about to surprise you. Most of it will go roughly the way you said, because people are consistent and because three decades of paying attention stand behind it.

The cost is not being wrong. The cost is that being right removes a man from the room.

A man who knows what is coming is never present for the part that is actually happening. He is a spectator at his own afternoon, checking each event off against the forecast as it arrives. And the terrible small joke of it is that the forty good minutes at the start get checked off the same way as everything else. They arrive, you note that they arrived, and you are already looking at the hour after.

You were never a spectator at your own table, and the written word tells a man to consider a hard day rather than to grade it against a prediction. Ecclesiastes 7:14 puts joy and consideration side by side as two ways of being present, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings a man back into an hour he had already written off.

And there is a second cost, quieter. Everybody in that room can feel a man who has already left. They cannot name it. They would not say you were absent, because you are talking and helping and doing your part. But there is a difference between a man in the room and a man observing the room, and people register it without knowing what they are registering.

You have been felt in that room in a way nobody has words for, and Scripture never once treats a man's presence as a small matter. Ecclesiastes 7:14 hands a man attention as his job in a hard day, and the Spirit of God is the one who supplies the attention when a man has run out of it.

One hour, handed over

So here is the whole of what I am asking, and it is deliberately narrow.

I am not asking you to hope for a different day. I am not going to tell a man of your years to expect people to change, and I would not respect anybody who told you that.

Name the one hour that is most certain. The one that could be described in detail right now. Almost every man in that position has one; it is usually the slack hour after the meal, and it usually has one person in it.

Then say out loud, tonight, in whatever plain words come, that the hour is not yours alone to carry.

You are able to hand over one hour without pretending you do not know what is in it, and it is written into Ecclesiastes 7:14 that God has set the one over against the other with the outcome deliberately withheld. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a man says a plain sentence out loud in a room by himself.

I want to be careful about what that is and is not. It is not a technique for changing the hour. Nothing here promises you that the hour goes differently, and if somebody tells you it will, be suspicious of them.

What it does is take you out of the position of the sole forecaster. At the moment you are the only one holding that hour, months in advance, alone, in your own head, every year. That is a job you were never given and it has been quietly wearing you down since long before this autumn.

You were never appointed the one who has to hold the whole afternoon, and the written word puts the ordering of the days in God's hands rather than in a man's forecast. Ecclesiastes 7:14 says God also hath set the one over against the other, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a weight off a man who has been holding it out of sheer competence.