Saturday Mornings Have a Tension and It Is Mine

There is no list. That is the thing you have never been able to explain to anybody, because there is genuinely no list.

There is no paper, no app, no whiteboard. Nobody has ever been given a job. If you asked your wife what the plan is on a Saturday morning she would say there is no plan, and she would be telling you the truth as she knows it.

But there is a list. It exists entirely inside you, it forms itself somewhere around Friday evening without being invited, and it has about nine things on it and a rough order and a sense of when each one ought to be done by.

And from about eight on a Saturday morning until roughly noon, you are running it, and nobody else in that house can see it, and every single one of them can feel it.

Your youngest asked you a question at half past nine last Saturday. Something ordinary. And you answered him perfectly pleasantly, and about four seconds later he said, in the voice a nine year old uses when he is checking something: are you annoyed?

You were not annoyed. You were on item four.

And you stood there in the hall with a bin bag in one hand and understood, for the first time in about a decade, that there is a particular tightness in that house on a Saturday morning, and that it is not the weekend, and it is not the children, and it is not the jobs.

It is a list nobody can see, being run by one person, in a house full of people trying to read him.

He put the word on the frame

Put the bag down a minute. It will keep. I am not going to tell you to relax on a Saturday, which is advice you have received before and which has never once worked.

Let me put a true thing down first, and Scripture will hold me to it and the Spirit will not have me making a fault out of a man who gets things done: the list is not a problem. A house runs on somebody carrying nine things in their head, and in that house it is you, and nobody has ever thanked you for it because the whole point of a well-run Saturday is that nobody notices it happening. Nobody is on trial here. Not your youngest, who asked a fair question, and not your wife, and not you.

And nobody else is in scope in this article. Not one word of it is about what anybody else does or does not do on a Saturday. Your own mouth is the only thing in scope.

Now come and look at an instruction about a house, and look at exactly where God tells them to put the word.

And thou shalt write them upon the door posts of thine house, and upon thy gates.Deuteronomy 11:20

Not on the people. Not on a schedule. On the frame.

It is a physical instruction about a fixed part of a building, the bit that does not move, the thing everybody in the household passes through several times a day without thinking about it.

And that placement is the teaching. God puts His word on the structure, not on the mood, not on the performance of the family that day. It is there on a good Saturday and it is there on a bad one, and it does not require anybody inside to be in a particular state for it to be on the frame.

A word can be fixed to your house rather than depending on how the morning goes, and God chose the door post on purpose. That is not me consoling a man with a bin bag. That is what is written, and where the instruction puts it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it in a hallway at half past eight on a Saturday.

Here is what nobody explains about blessing a house. When you speak over that hall, you are not managing the morning and you are not promising to be different by ten. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said. Your mouth is a door. God is the one coming through it, and He does not need item four to be finished first.

A blessing spoken at that frame is not a resolution to be more relaxed. Scripture says peace be to this house, which Christ told His people to say on going in (Luke 10:5), and it is a word put on a place rather than a commitment made about a self, and the Spirit is the one who carries it.

What everybody is actually reading

Now let me name it precisely, because you have been calling it tension and tension is the symptom. What is written names it differently, and the Spirit is not accusing a man who gets things done.

Nobody in that house is reacting to your mood. Your mood is fine and everybody would say so.

What they are reacting to is an invisible schedule with visible consequences. There is clearly something operating, because your attention keeps going somewhere, and there is clearly an order to it, because you get slightly brisk at certain points, and none of it is available to be seen or helped with or joined.

So a nine year old, being intelligent, builds the only model he can from the outside: something is going on with Dad, and I should check whether it is me.

Are you annoyed? is not a complaint. It is a boy doing his best with insufficient data.

That is not a character flaw and I will not make it one. It is what happens when one person carries a structure in their head in a room full of people who love them. And what is written never once asked a man to empty his head before a house could be blessed, and the Spirit is not standing in that hall auditing your Saturdays.

God is not asking you to become a less organized man, and He has never once made your ease the condition of His peace resting on a house. It is written that not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts (Zechariah 4:6), which is God ruling out capacity and effort as the mechanism, in writing and in advance, and the same Spirit who breathed that is standing in this hallway with you.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you to write the list down and delegate it, or to have a family meeting about Saturdays, or to stop caring whether the gutter gets done. And I am not telling you the morning will feel different if you say this. I have no authority to promise you an atmosphere in exchange for a sentence.

What I can put in your hands is this: something can go onto the frame of that house before the list starts running, and it is fixed there whether item four goes well or badly. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and a man with his hand on a door post at ten to nine is doing something the whole of Deuteronomy 11 is about.