The Week That Will Not Hold

She writes it on a Sunday night and it is beautiful.

Blue pen. The week in columns. Meals down one side because that is the thing that goes first when it goes. Who needs collecting and when. The two phone calls. The form. A box at the bottom that says one nice thing, which she added in February and has ticked twice.

By Tuesday afternoon it is a piece of paper on the side with something spilled on the corner of it.

Not because the week is unusually hard. There is no crisis this week. That is the part she cannot explain to anybody, including her sister, who is kind and would listen. There is no single thing wrong. It is that since the letter in March everything in her has gone soft at the edges, and the softness has come out into the house, and the house has come out into the week, and by Wednesday she genuinely could not tell you what she did on Monday.

So she writes another one. Sunday night, blue pen, columns.

She is thirty seven. She has three children, one of whom is eleven and has started noticing things.

And what has quietly become true, without any decision anywhere, is that she believes the shape is her job. Not in a theological way; she would not put it like that. She believes it the way you believe the floor will be there. If this house and this week and this family are going to have any order in them, she will have to produce it, by hand, out of herself, on a Sunday night in blue pen.

She has been doing that since March and she is very, very tired.

Last Tuesday she stood in the kitchen at twenty past four with the paper in her hand and did not put it down for about ninety seconds, and one of the children asked her twice what she was doing, and she said nothing, and then she put the kettle on.

You know the paper. Yours may be an app or a list on the back of an envelope. But you know what it is to keep producing a shape by hand and to have concluded, without ever saying it, that the producing is yours.

Where the shape comes from

Let me name the pit before we open anything, because if the verse lands on the wrong thing it will just be one more item on the list.

The pit is not disorganization. You are not a disorganized woman; a disorganized woman does not write columns in blue pen every Sunday for five months. The pit is exhaustion of a very specific kind: the exhaustion of somebody who has appointed herself the source of order in a life that has stopped producing its own, and who is failing at a job nobody assigned her, and who cannot stop because she cannot see who else would do it.

Here is the second sentence in the Bible. Read it slowly.

The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.Genesis 1:2

Formless. Void. Dark. That is the first state of affairs Scripture ever describes, and it is your Wednesday.

And look at what is happening over it. Not sorting. Not fixing. The word translated moved is a brooding word: it is the same picture Deuteronomy 32:11 uses for an eagle spreading itself over its nest and over its young. A bird over a nest. That is what the Spirit of God is doing over a deep that has no shape in it yet.

Here I teach you one thing about the Hebrew and I draw the line in the same breath, because on this site the two never travel apart. The word for Spirit there is ruach, which also means breath and wind, and it is a feminine word in Hebrew grammar, so the verb beside it takes a feminine form, exactly as it would beside the word for a hand or a city or a door. That is grammar, and grammar is not biology. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and Scripture describes Him with a father's traits and a mother's both, and the bird over the nest is one of the motherly ones, chosen by Him. It does not make the Spirit a woman and it does not make God a goddess. It makes the picture true.

Take that in the kitchen at twenty past four, and know it is not my comfort, it is the second sentence of the Bible. You are being brooded over, this week, in the exact state the week is in. Genesis 1:2 has the Spirit over the deep before one thing in it had an edge, and it is the Holy Spirit who is over yours, and there is not a different one issued for mothers of three.

And then read on one verse, because the order of operations is the whole answer.

And God said, Let there be light.Genesis 1:3

Brooding, then a word, then shape. The deep did not pull itself together. It did not draw up columns. It was spoken into order from above the water, while it was still being hovered over, and its entire job during that whole process was to be there.

You are not the edge this week is resting on, and you were never built to be one. Genesis 1:2 puts the Spirit of God over a deep with no edges in it anywhere, and it is the Holy Spirit who moves over what has gone soft at the sides.

The shape was never yours to produce out of yourself. That is not laziness being blessed; it is the order written into the first page of the Bible, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been over your week since March whether or not one plan survived a Tuesday.