Nothing on the Calendar Since March

The calendar is the paper kind, on the wall by the fridge, and there is a week in March with writing in every square and then there is nothing.

He put a dentist appointment in April. That is on there. Otherwise it is a clean grid of white boxes running to the end of the year, and he looks at it every time he goes past, which is about eleven times a day.

He is fifty-two, the company folded, and it was nobody's fault and everybody was decent about it. He has applied for a lot of things. Two of them got as far as a conversation. He is not sitting still.

What has crept up on him, and he has told nobody, is that he has started to dread the mornings. Not the job hunt. The mornings. He wakes and there is a whole open day in front of him with nothing in it that has to happen at a particular hour, and a whole open day turns out to be one of the heaviest objects there is.

He would never have believed that. For thirty years he would have said an open day was the thing he wanted most.

Anybody who has had a stretch with nothing in the diary knows this and mostly does not say it, because it sounds ungrateful and it sounds like laziness and it is neither. And I want to say now that I am not going to hand anybody a system. No structured day, no method for the unemployed. A man with an empty grid does not need one more thing he can fail at by Tuesday.

Who makes the mornings rejoice

Let me put down a line that hardly ever gets read out loud, because it is in the middle of a psalm about harvests.

They also that dwell in the uttermost parts are afraid at thy tokens: thou makest the outgoings of the morning and evening to rejoice.Psalm 65:8

Thou makest. God is the subject. The outgoings of the morning and the evening, meaning the going out of the light at dawn and the going down of it at dusk, are described as being made to rejoice by somebody.

Which is a strange enough sentence to sit with. The mornings are not neutral raw material waiting for a person to put something in them. They are described as having a character already, put there by God, on days when nobody has anything scheduled.

You are waking into mornings that God is described as making rejoice, and they had that before your calendar did. That is not a nice thought handed to a man staring at a grid. It is what is written in Psalm 65, and it is His Spirit who takes a written line and puts it into a yard with dew on the grass. The squares are paper. The mornings are God's and they were not left blank.

And notice how much of that psalm is about things that happen without anybody organizing them. Rivers, grain, the little hills rejoicing on every side. It is a psalm about a world that is doing something whether or not the reader has an appointment in it.

You have been put into a day that is already occupied with something, and none of it was waiting on your diary. Psalm 65:8 is where that is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old harvest song land in a man at a workbench.

The dread is not laziness

Now the part this category exists for.

Dreading an open day is not ingratitude. It is a completely predictable thing that happens to a person whose days were shaped by somewhere to be, and it happens fast, and it has nothing to do with character.

I also want to name why it is so heavy, because I think nobody has, and naming it takes some of the weight out.

An open day is not empty. It is full of every hour, all at once, all of them equally available and none of them assigned, and a mind faced with that does not experience freedom, it experiences a demand. Thirty years of somewhere to be at eight was not oppression, it was a decision somebody else made so he did not have to make it eleven times before lunch.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.Psalm 23:1-2

Maketh me to lie down. The shepherd decides when the sheep rests. It is not laziness in that psalm and it is not the sheep's own arrangement.

You were never designed to assign every hour of your own day, and finding that hard is not a defect in you. Psalm 23:2 is the written word for it, and His Spirit is the one who lets a man stop treating a hard morning as evidence about his character.

You are held right now, at eight in the morning, with an empty grid on the wall and nowhere to be. It is written that God makes the outgoings of the morning and the evening to rejoice, and it is the Spirit who makes that true in a man who has been out of work since March.

If any of this ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor plainly about the mornings. Being out of work does measurable things to a person and there are people whose actual job is this, and being held by God has never been a reason to face it alone in a yard.