Counting Fridays

On the Sunday he stood at the kitchen counter with the flat of his hand on the worktop and said it out loud to an empty room. No more. Not a wish and not a mood. He meant it the way a man means a thing in his chest, in the ribs, where the meaning has weight.

He got to Friday.

And on the Friday he did it again, the thing, the one this article is not going to name because it is his and not mine, and the naming would only give you somebody else's shame to look at instead of your own.

That was in the spring.

What has happened since is quieter and, if I am honest with you, worse.

There is a note in his phone with no words in it. Just a number, and he edits the number. It said four for a while and that was the best it has been. Then it said zero. Then it climbed to two, then zero again, then one, then zero, and tonight it says three, and the whole evening he has been watching the clock the way a man watches a pot.

And somewhere in all that counting, the praying stopped.

Not with a bang. He did not announce anything to God. He simply began to want a number worth bringing. He wants to walk in with a run behind him, a clean fortnight at least, the way a man walks into a meeting with the report already printed and the figures already reconciled, so that when somebody asks how it is going he has an answer that does not embarrass him.

So he waits. And the number goes up. And it goes back to zero. And the waiting extends itself politely, month after month, and the counter he leaned his hand on that Sunday has not been leaned on since.

Then a Saturday, this one, ordinary. His boy, who is ten, has the bike upside down on the grass with the chain off it and comes to the back door with his hands already black and says, Dad, can you.

So he goes out and crouches in the wet grass and threads the chain back over the ring, and the boy hangs over his shoulder the entire time talking about a lizard he saw, and the sun is doing that thing across the fence, and it takes four minutes.

And here is what stops him, kneeling there with a chain in his hands.

The boy did not check. He did not ask what kind of week his father had. He did not want to know the number, or whether the man crouching in the grass had kept his word to himself in the spring, or how many Fridays there had been. He wanted the chain on. He came to his father because that is who his father is, and the state of the father's fortnight never entered the child's head.

And the man in the grass, with the chain in his black hands, thinks: I would never have made him qualify first.

And then, much quieter, the second half of it.

So why have I been making myself.

You have knelt in that grass. Maybe not a bike, maybe not a boy, but the arithmetic, and the note in the phone, and the report you are waiting to be able to bring.

Counting is not the same as coming back

I want to name the swap first, because until it is named it will keep happening, and it happens to serious men more than to careless ones.

Somewhere in the spring, a man stopped praying and started auditing, and because auditing feels grave and costly and unflattering, it passed itself off as repentance for the better part of a year. It is not repentance. Repentance is a turn toward a Person. An audit is a man alone with a spreadsheet and a mirror, and there is no Person anywhere in it, which is why it never ends and never absolves and never once in the history of the world has produced a single free man.

And notice the sequence, because it is the whole trap. He is not staying away because he stopped caring. He is staying away because he cares enormously and has decided that caring means arriving presentable.

Now hear this said over you rather than about you. You are welcome at that counter tonight at whatever number the note in your phone is showing, and I am not being kind to you, I am reading you what stands written. Scripture puts it in one short line about how God deals with the people He has called, and the Holy Spirit is the One pressing it into a man who has spent nine months believing the opposite.

For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance.Romans 11:29

What that verse actually says

Paul writes that about Israel, and he states it as a rule of God's character, which is why it has carried weight for everybody who has read it since.

Without repentance, in the older English, does not mean without sorrow. It means without a change of mind. God does not reconsider. He does not issue a calling on approval and then take it back when the returns come in poor. There is no clause. There is no probation. What He gave, He gave, and He is not the sort to hand a man something and then stand behind him with His hand half out waiting to see whether it was a mistake.

So put your number next to that sentence and see how small it looks. The note in your phone is a record of Fridays. Romans 11:29 is a statement about the mind of God. Those two things are not in the same weight class and were never meant to be compared, and you have been letting the lighter one issue verdicts on the heavier one all year.

You have a calling that was never issued on loan, and the reason is written into that verse rather than into your run of weeks; the Spirit who inspired the line is the same One who has kept you awake at eleven o'clock on a Friday caring about it, which is not the behavior of a man God has finished with.

And now the other half, once, warmly

Because I am not going to hand you a soft answer and walk off.

Nothing here says the Fridays do not matter. They matter. They cost you, they cost people near you, and you know that better than any writer does, which is exactly why you are reading at this hour instead of sleeping. What is settled is God's faithfulness. What is not settled, and what He has never pretended is settled, is the whole of a man's walking.

But look at the order Scripture puts things in, because the order is the mercy:

Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance?Romans 2:4

It is the goodness that leads. Not the audit. Not the number. Not the man standing outside the room getting himself into a fit condition to enter it. Every real turn any man has ever made began with kindness arriving before he had cleaned anything up, and the audit has been keeping the kindness at arm's length all year while wearing the costume of taking it seriously.

You are being led rather than processed, and that is what the word says of the goodness of God in Romans 2:4, and His Spirit is doing the leading right now, in a kitchen, at this hour, with a number on a screen that He has not once looked at.