Dressed by Noon and Nothing Else

The light has crossed the whole floor and reached the leg of the chair, which means it is noon.

He is dressed. That is the thing. Trousers, and a shirt with buttons, actual buttons, and socks, and he did it in three goes with two long sits in between, and it took him from twenty past eight until about half past eleven.

The chair by the window has the rest of the week on it. A jumper from Tuesday. The shirt he did not manage on Thursday, still on its hanger, still hooked over the chair back where he left it when he decided he would try again tomorrow. He has stopped moving the pile. Moving the pile is a job, and jobs are being rationed.

His phone is on the bed with three messages on it that he has read and not answered, because answering is also a job. One of them is from his sister and it says just checking in and he is going to answer it. He is. Later.

Here is what he has been doing since half past eleven, and it is the part nobody sees. He has been running a small court. The prosecution has been up for a while now and it is very well prepared. It has the figures. His father was out of the house at five in the morning for forty years and never once mentioned it. Other people have three children and a commute and they manage. It is Thursday. It is noon on a Thursday and the sum total of the day so far, the whole of it, everything, is that a grown man has clothes on.

The defense has nothing to say. The defense has not spoken in some time.

And the verdict comes down the way it always comes down, in one flat sentence, in his own voice, which is what makes it so hard to appeal. Getting dressed is not an achievement.

He is sitting on the end of the bed with his hands between his knees. The light is on the chair leg. Somewhere below, a door, a car, somebody else's ordinary Thursday going past the window.

He is not going to tell anyone about this morning. What he is going to do is say he has been busy, and then he is going to lie down at some point this afternoon and he is going to be ashamed of that too.

The two things you throw away

Let me name what happened this morning before I say anything else, because you will not name it kindly and the court in your head certainly will not.

You did a hard thing under conditions nobody watching would believe. Getting dressed cost you what a full day costs other people. That is not a story about your character. It is a plain fact about a body and a week and a season, and the reason it sounds like an excuse to you is that you have been listening to the prosecution all morning and it has had the floor to itself.

And before I go further, one ordinary sentence, warmly meant. If this has been most mornings for weeks rather than this one morning, tell your doctor. Say it as plainly as you would say it about a knee. That is not a spiritual failure, going is not a retreat, and nothing in what follows is a reason to put it off.

Now here is the line I want under you.

A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth.Isaiah 42:3

I want you to see what those two objects are, because Isaiah did not pick them at random. He picked the two cheapest things in the ancient world.

A reed grows in a marsh, in thousands. A reed cut for a pipe or a pen is worth almost nothing, and the second it is cracked it plays flat and writes badly, so you snap it and reach into the water for another. Nobody agonizes. It costs nothing to replace.

A wick that has gone out is worse. There is no flame on it, only smoke and the smell. The whole household knows what to do with a smoking wick: you pinch it, and you fit a new one, and the room gets its light back. Keeping it is not kindness, it is inefficiency.

Those are the two pictures the prophet uses for the Servant of God coming into the world, and what he says about Him is that He does not do the obvious thing with either of them. He does not snap the cracked one. He does not pinch out the one that is only smoking. He lets a thing that is producing nothing measurable stay exactly where it is.

You are the wick that is still smoking, and you are not going to be pinched out at noon on a Thursday. That is not me being gentle with you. It is written in Isaiah 42:3, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line about a marsh reed and a spent lamp and lays it across a man sitting on the end of his bed with his hands between his knees.

You have a Servant who does not measure you by output, and you were never on trial in the way this morning has felt. The written word says He brings judgment forth unto truth, and the Spirit of God is the One who lets a person hear that as an actual acquittal rather than a nice idea about somebody else.

The court that convened without a judge

Now look at the last clause of that verse, because it is doing something and almost nobody reads it.

He shall bring forth judgment unto truth.

There is a judgment coming out of this Servant, and the promise attached to it is that it will be true. Not lenient. True. Which means that somewhere there is an accurate account of your Thursday, and it is not the one that was read out in your bedroom at half past eleven.

Because look at that court. Who convened it? Who called the witnesses? The prosecution had every figure ready and the defense had not prepared at all, and the judge and the prosecutor and the accused were all one exhausted man who had been awake since twenty past eight fighting with a shirt. No court on earth would let that stand. Not one.

I am not telling you the verdict was harsh. I am telling you it was not lawful. It came from a bench nobody was sitting on.

You were never given the office of judge over your own life, and the seat you have been sentencing yourself from is not yours. Isaiah 42:3 hands the judging to Somebody else and says what comes out of Him is true, and the Holy Spirit is the One who moves a man off a bench he was never appointed to.

And I am not going to hand you the afternoon, or tomorrow, or a plan for the week. I have nothing to say about the week. I have no schedule for you and I am not going to suggest one thing you could try, because the last thing a person in your condition needs is one more item to fail. What is in front of you is the next stretch of this one day: the light on the floor, the messages you have not answered, the lying down you are already ashamed of and which is, in fact, allowed.

You have strength for the rest of this afternoon, and it is His and not something you have to go and find. That is Isaiah 42:3 in the present tense, and it is His Spirit who carries it off the page and into a body that has already spent everything it had on buttons.