Returning Is the Resting

The shutters come halfway down at ten past seven, and that is how you know she is nearly finished but not finished.

Halfway is the honest position for that shop. It says: I am not open, do not come in with a full basket. It also says: if you have run out of something small, duck under, I will still take your money. She has been doing halfway for eleven years and the street knows exactly what it means.

Inside she is doing the things nobody sees. The float. The crate of mangoes that got knocked. The freezer that makes a sound she has been meaning to deal with since March. There is a list on a piece of card by the till and it is written in three different pens, and the top three items were written by a woman who was more optimistic than the woman standing there now.

And at some point in that half hour, most evenings, one more item goes through her mind. It does not get written on the card. It is too big for the card, and also too private, and also she is not sure a person is allowed to write that sort of thing between call about the freezer and pay Elroy.

The item is: sort things out with God.

That is what it has become, you see. An item. Something to be got round to, requiring energy she does not have, sitting on the same list as the freezer, and losing to the freezer every single week because the freezer at least has a phone number.

And so a woman who is tired filed the one thing that would rest her under the heading of things that will cost her more.

That is the sad arithmetic of it. She is not avoiding God. She is protecting a supply of strength that is already spent, and she has classified Him, without meaning any of it, as a demand.

That is you at ten past seven.

You've got it on a list. Not because you stopped caring, but because at some point it stopped feeling like relief and started feeling like a job. And every week it loses to whatever has a phone number attached, and every week the item gets a little heavier from sitting there.

He put returning and rest in the same breath

Isaiah is talking to people who are exhausting themselves organizing their own rescue. Watch which two words He sets side by side, because most of us have never once heard them together.

For thus saith the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel; In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength.Isaiah 30:15

Returning and rest. Not returning and then rest, once the paperwork is through. The two are named in one breath as one condition, which means the turn you have been filing under work is filed wrong. It belongs on the other list. It belongs on the very short list of things that make you lighter.

You are not being asked for more strength, and the turn was never going to cost you any, and that is not me lowering the bar: Isaiah 30:15 says rest in writing, in the same clause as returning, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying it who can move an item from one list to another inside a tired woman.

Now let me teach you something precise, because precision is a kindness here. The Hebrew word behind returning is shuvah, and it belongs to the same root as the ordinary word for coming back. It is not a technical religious term. It is what a child does at the end of a street, what a boat does at the end of a day. And the word beside it, nachat, is settling, the way dust settles, the way a body settles into a chair after standing all day on a hard floor.

That is the pair. Coming back, and settling. Anybody who has stood on a concrete floor for eleven hours knows exactly what those two words mean together, and it is not a project.

You have been carrying this in the wrong hand, and it has been getting heavier for the carrying, which is written in Isaiah 30:15 rather than being my sympathy for your week, with the Spirit of God able to open a hand that a list has kept closed.

And look at the second half of the verse: in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength. Not in effort. Not in organization. Strength arrives, in this verse, through quietness, which is the opposite of how everybody I know tries to get strong.

The freezer will still need calling. Elroy will still need paying. None of that is being spiritualized away, and I will not pretend it is. But the item that has been losing to the freezer for eleven weeks is the one item on that card that hands strength back instead of taking it.

This is yours right now, at ten past seven, with the shutters halfway and the float half counted. Scripture is what puts it there and not my encouragement, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it a rest you can feel rather than a doctrine you nod at.