They Changed It Again This Quarter

The third one came on a Thursday.

Not a large one. That is what makes it hard to explain when somebody asks why you look like that. It moved two things and renamed one and added a step near the end.

You will have it running by Monday. That is not in doubt. It is never in doubt.

But when it landed in your inbox on Thursday morning you sat back in the chair and something in you went completely flat, and you sat there for about four minutes not doing anything.

The first one was in March.

Here is the thing about it that nobody outside this would understand. It is not the work of changing. Changing is maybe two hours and a conversation with your people.

It is that no reason ever comes with it.

Not a hostile silence. Just a document, correctly formatted, arriving. Somebody somewhere had a reason and the reason stayed where it was.

So you retrain your people on something you cannot explain, and one of them asks why, and you say something honest and thin, and you watch them accept it because you are the one who runs the place.

Three times since March.

And you are tired in a way that has nothing to do with the hours. You slept eight hours on Saturday and woke up as though you had not.

That kind of tiredness has a cause and the cause is not the work.

Be still, and know

There is a verse everybody knows and almost nobody reads in its own setting.

Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth. (Psalm 46:10, King James Version)

The psalm around it is not calm. It is earthquakes and mountains going into the sea and nations raging. It is a psalm about ground that will not stay still.

And into all of that comes a command to be still, which in the Hebrew is closer to: let your hands drop.

You have a command available to you that costs one minute and changes what a whole quarter does to you, and Psalm 46:10 gives it in the middle of moving ground rather than in a quiet room. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes a minute do that, and He was in the chair with you for the four on Thursday.

Now the part that names your actual tiredness.

What is exhausting you is not the two hours of changing. It is the bracing. Every day since March there has been a small readiness in you for the next document, and readiness costs energy even when nothing arrives.

That is what eight hours of sleep does not touch. Sleep repairs work. It does not repair vigilance.

You have been paying for a readiness rather than for a workload, and it is written that the still one is the one who knows. The Spirit of God is the one who takes vigilance off a person, and Psalm 46 sets that command right inside the shaking rather than after it.

And look at what the stillness is for. Be still and know that I am God.

Not be still and feel better. Not be still and cope. Know. The stillness is what makes room for a fact to register.

You are able to let one fact land that has not had room to land since March, and Scripture makes the dropping of the hands the way in. The Holy Spirit is the one who does the knowing part, and Psalm 46:10 is where the sequence is set.

What the minute is actually doing

Let me be practical about the minute, because it sounds like nothing and it is not nothing.

When the next document arrives, there is an automatic sequence in you now. Read it fast. Assess the damage. Start rearranging the week. Begin composing the thin sentence for whoever asks why.

All four of those start inside about ten seconds and none of them are decisions.

The minute breaks the sequence. That is all it does and it is enough.

You are able to interrupt something automatic, and the written word puts a stillness in the middle of a shaking earth rather than after it settles. The Spirit of God is the one who gives a person back the ten seconds, and Psalm 46 is the whole warrant for taking them.

There is a second thing the minute does, and it is the one that will matter in six months.

The bracing has started to be about people. Not consciously. But the document has a somebody behind it, and a person who braces three times in six months starts to picture that somebody, and the picture gets a face and then a tone.

You have a way to stop that before it hardens, and it is written that the still one is the one who knows God rather than the one who has worked out who to blame. The Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a woman soft toward people she will never meet, and one minute is enough time for Him to do it.

Stand still before you open it

So here is the thing to do, and the next one is coming, and this is what to do when it does.

Before you open it, stand up and stand still for one full minute. Do not read anything. Do not plan anything. Do not pray anything elaborate.

Stand there and let your hands hang and let one minute pass.

You are obeying a command rather than performing a technique, and Psalm 46:10 says be still and know that I am God. The Spirit of God is the one who does something in that minute that cannot be done in the ten seconds you usually have.

Then sit down and open it and do the work, exactly as you always do, and have it running by Monday.

The reason the minute goes before rather than after is that afterward is repair. Before is prevention. Afterward the automatic sequence is already three moves in, and the minute gets spent calming something down.

Before, there is nothing to calm. There is a woman standing still and a document that has not been opened.

You have been given the order in the right sequence, and the written word puts the stillness first and the knowing after it. The Holy Spirit is the one who works in that order, and Psalm 46:10 has been holding it open the whole time.

Then open it, and run it, and be finished by Monday.