I Give the Hour Away

The same words go at the top of every article here. This is not medicine. I am not a clinician, nothing on this page is treatment, and nothing I write ever takes the place of a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist. If the reason you are this tired has not been looked at, that is the call to make today, and it goes ahead of everything else on this page.

Now. Something got canceled this week and you got an hour back.

And I want to know what happened to it. Not in general. That specific hour.

Because my guess is that within about ninety seconds of finding out it was free, it had been allocated. You rang somebody. You did the thing that had been waiting. You went and picked somebody up early, or you started the job you had been meaning to do, and by the end of the hour it had gone somewhere useful and none of it went to you.

And that is not one hour. That is a pattern going back years, and the pattern is so smooth that you have never once seen it happen.

It is described as a habit and not as a crisis

There is a line in Luke about what Jesus did regularly, and the word that matters is the ordinary one.

And he withdrew himself into the wilderness, and prayed. (Luke 5:16, King James Version)

Withdrew himself. That is an active verb with a person doing it to themselves rather than a thing that happened to Him.

And in the wider passage this is not a one off. It is described as what He did, repeatedly, and crucially it happens while there is still demand. The crowds are there. The need has not gone down. He withdraws anyway.

You are permitted to withdraw while the demand is still live, and it has never once required the demand to drop first. Luke 5:16 puts the withdrawing in the middle of a busy stretch rather than after it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person take an hour that other people could use.

I find the ordinariness of it helpful. There is no drama in that verse. Nobody is collapsing. It is not presented as a heroic act of self preservation. It is just what He did, as a matter of habit, and the account does not defend it.

You have never once needed a defense for an hour. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a small ordinary thing legitimate again, and it is written that He withdrew himself, which is a sentence about a person deciding rather than a person being sent.

Why the hour never survives

Let me be practical, because this is fixable and most of what I write is not.

The reason the hour goes is that an unallocated hour feels like a resource, and there is one person in that house who knows what needs doing. So the hour meets the list, and the list always wins, because the list is concrete and made of other people and your own rest is abstract and made of nothing.

So the answer is not willpower. The answer is to make the hour concrete before it meets the list.

Decide what it is for in advance. Not something improving. Something specific and ordinary, so that when the hour turns up it already has a name and is not available.

You are able to make an hour as solid as anything else in that day. Luke 5:16 has a specific place attached to the withdrawing rather than a vague intention, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns a good intention into an actual hour.

And the second half, which people find harder than the first: do not announce it. An announced hour becomes a negotiation. A quiet one does not.

You were never obliged to publish your own schedule, and keeping something quiet has never once been the same as lying. The Spirit of God is the one who gives a person permission to be unaccounted for, and what is written has Him withdraw rather than explain.

The plain routing, and it comes ahead of the hour

Here is the part of this page that is not comfort, and it belongs before the invitation rather than after it.

If something is happening right now that frightens you, that is 911, and no hour is the answer to it. If the heavy thing today is in your own mind, 988 answers, and a real person picks up. And if the tiredness itself has never been looked at, the first free hour you find goes on ringing a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist, and not on anything else.

You are permitted to spend a found hour on yourself, and that has never once been a misuse of one. Luke 5:16 has the withdrawing happen for a purpose rather than as an escape, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets a person to spend the first hour on the call.

That is the exception I would make to everything above. The first one goes on the phone. After that they are yours.

You have one hour with a job on it and the rest have never once been spoken for. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in a call somebody has been meaning to make for months, and what is written puts the withdrawing into the pattern of a working life rather than outside it.