Rising Early and Going Late

There's a stretch in my calendar every year that runs from September into the first week of November, and it is stacked. In-state travel, out-of-state travel, one thing rolling into the next.

None of this is a surprise. It's the same stretch every year and I can see it coming from a long way off. And every year, about a week in, I'm already tired.

None of it is hard. Pull any single date off that calendar and look at it by itself and most of them are things I'm glad to be doing. Several of them I'd be disappointed to miss. There is nothing on there I would call a burden.

They just stack. One on top of another, with no room in between for anything to settle.

Your version might not involve travel. It might be a season at work, or a stretch with kids in three directions, or a run of weeks where nothing is actually wrong and you're still running on empty by the end of it.

Psalm 127 opens with a line that sounds like a slogan.

“Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain.” (Psalm 127:1, ESV)

We usually hear that as a warning about self-reliance, and it is. But look at who it's aimed at. Not the lazy. The builders and the watchmen. The ones already up, already working, already doing the right thing. Nobody has to tell a man asleep in his bed that his labor is in vain. This is written to people who are getting it done.

“It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep.” (Psalm 127:2, ESV)

Anxious toil. That's the phrase. Not toil, which Scripture never apologizes for. Anxious toil. The extra hours that aren't producing anything except the feeling that you're covering yourself.

There's a tell. Honest work has a place where it stops. You come to the end of what was actually yours and you can feel that you're there. Anxious work has no such place. No amount of it ever produces the feeling you're working for, so you keep going, and the extra hours aren't finishing anything. They're insurance against a fear you probably couldn't name.

That isn't stewardship. That's trying to be God about it.

The psalm doesn't tell you to work less. It tells you to sleep. Sleep is the one thing you can't do while you're managing outcomes, which is exactly why it's the sign. You lie down and the world runs for eight hours without your supervision, and in the morning it's still there. Every night is a small rehearsal of the thing you claim to believe.

He gives to his beloved sleep. Not as a reward for finishing. As a gift, to the beloved, in the middle of an unfinished list.

The rest of the psalm moves to children, and people sometimes treat that as a change of subject. I don't think it is. It's the same point with different furniture. A house is built out of things you don't control, over a span of time you don't get to set, and the outcome shows up long after your part of the work is done. You plant into a result you may not be standing there to see.

Which is most of what any of us are doing. Raising somebody. Building something at a church. Setting money aside for a season that isn't here yet. Putting effort into work whose fruit lands years out. All of it real, none of it guaranteed by how early you got up.

So look at your fall the way it actually is. Some of what's on it is yours to carry, and you should carry it well. Some of it was never yours, and you picked it up anyway because nobody stopped you.

Then go to bed. He's building it either way, and he'd rather you were rested for your part.