I Am Afraid Of Undoing It

You got it back and now you are guarding it.

That is the honest shape of this year. Something happened, it took a long time, and you are on the other side of it, and everybody has been magnificent and everybody has moved on.

And you have not, and not for the reason people assume.

They think you are tired. You are, some days. What is actually happening is that you have a small, permanent, low level calculation running about everything, and the calculation is: could this undo it.

Stairs. Carrying the shopping in one trip. The thing your son wants you to do in the yard.

None of those is dangerous and you know that, and the calculation runs anyway, and it usually says no, and you say something about being tired, and everybody accepts it because you have earned the right to be tired.

Here is what I want to name, because nobody names it and it is doing something to you.

You are not resting. You are on guard, which is a completely different activity, and it is exhausting in a way that rest is not.

Return unto thy rest

There is a line in the psalms where somebody talks to their own soul after coming through something, and the wording is unusual.

Return unto thy rest, O my soul; for the LORD hath dealt bountifully with thee. (Psalm 116:7, King James Version)

Return to your rest, O my soul, for the LORD has dealt bountifully with you.

Return unto thy rest. He is instructing himself to go back to a state he was in before, which means the state exists and he has been out of it.

You have a verse where a person addresses their own soul about resting after a hard passage, and Psalm 116:7 has never once described that rest as immobility. The soul is told to return to it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings a person back into rest after they have been out of it for a long time.

You are able to read the whole psalm and see what he has come through. The sorrows of death compassed me, and the pains of hell gat hold upon me. It is written by somebody on the far side of something serious.

And notice what the rest is grounded in. Not in his condition. For the LORD hath dealt bountifully with thee. The reason he can return to rest is what God has done, not whether his body has fully recovered.

That is the piece that matters, because your guard is grounded in the opposite thing. Your guard is grounded in your condition, which is exactly the thing that cannot be relied on, which is why the guard never comes down.

You are able to rest on something other than the state of your own body, and Psalm 116:7 has never once made the resting conditional on being sure. The Spirit of God is the one who brings somebody back into rest, and the verse grounds it in what God has done rather than in what the body is doing.

Guarding is not resting

Here is the distinction and it is the whole of the article.

Rest is when nothing is running. Guarding is a continuous activity that produces no rest at all.

You have been doing something strenuous all year and calling it recovery, and Psalm 116:7 has never once described the rest of God as vigilance. It is written return unto thy rest, O my soul, and the Holy Spirit is the one who stands a person down from a watch they have been keeping alone.

Think about what your day actually contains. Every time something physical is proposed, however small, a calculation runs. That is not one calculation, it is forty a day, and every one of them costs something.

This has been a busier year than any year before the thing happened.

And here is what makes it self sustaining, which is why it does not resolve on its own. The guard produces a small amount of relief each time it says no, and the relief confirms that the guard was needed, and the whole thing tightens quietly over months.

Nothing about it is irrational. It came from something real and it was correct at the time. It is simply still running long after the situation that required it.

You are able to stand a guard down that was correct once, and doing that has never once been the same as pretending nothing happened. The Spirit of God is the one who brings a soul back into rest, and Psalm 116:7 puts the ground of it in what God has done.

Two minutes, and stop before the question

So here is the assignment, and the second half of it is designed around the calculation.

Do two minutes of something easy with one of them, and stop before anything in you asks a question.

You are able to do two minutes and stop while nothing has been risked, and stopping early has never once been the same as never starting. It is written that the LORD hath dealt bountifully with thee, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present with a woman walking slowly down her own hall.

Two minutes. Not ten. This is deliberate and it is not because you are less able than anybody else on this site.

It is because the calculation needs about three minutes to start, and if you stop at two it never runs. The whole assignment is designed to finish before the guard notices it began.

Something easy. Walking to the end of the hall and back. Standing at the door. The very smallest thing that involves your body moving on purpose.

And with one of them, which does two things. It makes it an ordinary family moment rather than a test, and it means somebody is there, which the guard finds reassuring even though it will not admit it.

Then stop. Sit down. And notice, afterward, that nothing was undone.

You have two minutes available that cost nothing, and none of that has never once put anything at risk. Psalm 116:7 tells a soul to return to its rest on the ground of what God has done, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a mother stopping while everything is still easy.

Then tomorrow, two minutes again. Not three. Two, for about three weeks, until the calculation has nothing to feed on.