I Start In November And Finish On The Day

It started on a Tuesday in the second week of November and nobody knows.

There was no announcement. You did not sit down and begin. You were doing something else and a thought arrived about the dates, and forty minutes later you were writing a list, and that was the start of it.

Since then it has been running underneath everything. Not as a project with hours on it. As a background process, going while you drive, while you shop for ordinary things, while somebody is talking to you about something unrelated and you are nodding.

And when it is finally over, on the evening of the day itself, somebody will say that you must be exhausted, and they will mean the day. They will mean the six hours of it that they saw.

You will say yes, it was a long one. Both of you will be talking about a fraction.

Here is the thing I want to put in front of you tonight, and it is not a complaint on your behalf. It is a question, and it is a slightly frightening one, which is why nobody in your position ever asks it.

How many hours has this actually taken?

Not the day. The whole of it. From that Tuesday in November.

You do not know. Almost nobody in your position does, and the not knowing is not accidental. There is a reason a person avoids that number, and we are going to look at it.

And of the vexation of his heart

There is a question in Ecclesiastes about work that nobody quotes at this time of year, and it belongs to you.

For what hath man of all his labour, and of the vexation of his heart, wherein he hath laboured under the sun? (Ecclesiastes 2:22, King James Version)

Look at the two things he puts side by side. The work of the hands, and the vexation of the heart. Not one and then the other. Both, together, as one account.

That second thing is what nobody counts. The vexation. The turning it over, the worrying about who will be difficult, the deciding and re-deciding, the holding of a whole day's worth of arrangements in a head that also has to run a life.

Solomon puts that in the ledger. He does not treat it as free.

You have been running an account with half of it uncounted, and it is written into Ecclesiastes 2:22 that the vexation of the heart sits in the same ledger as the work of the hands. The written word refuses to treat the turning over as nothing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a permission rather than a piece of ancient pessimism.

And notice that this is a question rather than a verdict. He is not saying the work was worthless. He is asking what a person actually has of it, which is a different question and a fair one.

You are permitted to ask what you have of all of it, and Ecclesiastes 2:22 puts that question in Scripture without answering it cheaply. The Spirit of God is the one who is present with a woman asking a question she has been avoiding since November, and the passage leaves the asking standing.

Why nobody counts

Let me say plainly why the adding up has never happened, because I think you half know and have never let it finish forming.

If you knew the number, you would have to do something about it. That is the fear. A vague largeness can be carried indefinitely. A specific number of hours is a fact, and facts invite decisions, and the decisions all look either selfish or like letting somebody down.

So the number stays unformed, and the work stays unlimited, and the whole thing runs another year.

You have kept a number vague in order to keep going, and Scripture never once treats an honest accounting as disloyalty. Ecclesiastes 2:22 asks the question out loud, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a woman in the moment she stops protecting herself from her own arithmetic.

And there is a second reason, quieter and harder. As long as nobody counts it, it stays love. The minute it has hours attached, it starts to look like labor, and you are afraid that naming it as work will spoil something.

I want to answer that directly. Counting it does not turn love into labor. It turns invisible labor into visible labor, and the love was never in the invisibility. You did not love those people because nobody knew what it cost. You loved them, and separately, nobody knew.

You were never made more loving by the hiddenness of it, and the written word puts the labor and the heart's vexation together as a real cost that God sees. Ecclesiastes 2:22 counts both, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a woman from confusing being unseen with being generous.

Count it on purpose

So here is the assignment, and I want to be clear that it is not a step toward doing less.

Count the hours this has already taken, and write the number down.

Go back to that Tuesday in November. Not precisely; you will not manage precise and it does not need to be. Estimate honestly, week by week, and include the vexation: the evening you spent working out the arrangement, the four separate conversations, the two hours in a shop, the lying awake about who sits where.

Then write the number on a piece of paper.

You are able to count what a thing costs without owing anybody a change, and Ecclesiastes 2:22 asks its question and leaves the person free. The written word puts the vexation of the heart in the account, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman writing down a figure she has spent six weeks not calculating.

Nothing else. Do not show it to anybody. Do not use it in a conversation. Do not build a plan on it, and above all do not decide tonight what you are going to stop doing.

The number is not a lever. It is a fact about your life that has been unavailable to you, and having it is worth something in itself. A person who knows the true size of what they carry stands differently, even when they carry the same thing.

You are getting the true size of a thing you have carried blind, and it has never once required you to put any of it down. Ecclesiastes 2:22 asks what a person has of their own work, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present when the honest answer finally has a number on it.