Nobody Is Doing This For Me

You noticed it on Tuesday.

You were standing there pouring, and the thought arrived fully formed and slightly shocking in its clarity.

Nobody is doing this for me.

Nobody is coming round to see whether I have had enough. Nobody notices when I am dry. There is no one whose job it is to check on the state of me, and there has not been for a long time.

And then you felt bad about the thought, and finished the watering, and went to work.

So let me start with the thought rather than the bad feeling about it.

Because the bad feeling arrived so fast that the thought never got looked at. It was heard, judged and put away inside about four seconds, and then the watering carried on and the morning carried on and nothing in the day changed. And a thing that gets buried that quickly usually has something in it.

It is true. And it is worth looking at rather than apologizing for.

The Lord will take me up

David writes a line about the most extreme case of not being looked after, and he writes it as a statement rather than as a hope.

When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up. (Psalm 27:10, King James Version)

Then the LORD will take me up.

You are covered by an arrangement that begins exactly where everybody else's ends, and nobody's absence has ever once been able to leave you uncollected. Psalm 27:10 says when my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says that over a woman standing at a sill with a jug.

Look at where he sets the line. Father and mother. The two people who, by any ordinary reckoning, are the last to stop.

He does not say when my friends drift or when the church forgets. He goes to the outermost case, the one everybody assumes is impossible, and he puts God's action on the far side of it.

Which means there is no level of being unlooked after that arrives before the taking up. The taking up starts where the forsaking ends, and the verse is built so that nothing gets in underneath it.

You were never going to reach a point where nobody had you, and the outermost case has never once been a case that verse fails to cover. The Spirit of God is what makes that a load bearing thing rather than a comfort, and Psalm 27 is where the taking up is written down.

The thought was not ungrateful

Now the practical half, and it is about what happened after the thought.

You felt bad about it. That is what I want to look at.

The thought was an accurate observation about a set of circumstances. Nobody is checking on her. That is either true or it is not, and the woman in that kitchen is the one with the information, and she said it is true.

You are the only person in the world holding the facts about your own week, and a true report given by the one who has them has never once been a complaint. Psalm 27:10 assumes the forsaking rather than denying it, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets an accurate sentence stand.

And the guilt that arrived four seconds later was not about accuracy. It was about permission. Somewhere you learned that noticing you are not being looked after is a complaint, and that complaining is not allowed.

You were charged four seconds after making an accurate observation, and stating a true thing about your own circumstances has never once been a complaint. What is written in Psalm 27:10 assumes the forsaking rather than denying it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who allows a true sentence to stand.

And there is something worth saying about the asymmetry, because it is real and it should not be smoothed over.

The pouring goes one way, toward something that cannot pour back. That is the actual shape of the week and it is tiring in a way that has nothing to do with effort.

I am not going to tell you that is fine. It is not fine. It is simply true at the moment, and true things are better held than argued with.

You are carrying a genuine asymmetry, and the tiredness in that has never once been the tiredness of an ungrateful woman. The Spirit of God is the one who says that without correcting anybody, and Psalm 27 is the ground under it.

Pour for yourself first

So here is the instruction and it is very small and it is not a solution.

Pour a glass of water for yourself first today. Drink some of it. Then water the plant.

That is the whole thing. Thirty seconds, in that order, deliberately.

And here is why in that order. Because the sequence in your life at the moment runs one way only, outward, and nobody is at the other end of it. Putting one small thing in front of it does not fix the asymmetry and it is not meant to.

You are allowed one thing that runs the other way today, and thirty seconds of receiving has never once been a claim that the week is now fair. Psalm 27:10 puts the taking up past the last forsaking, and the Spirit of God is the one with a woman at her own tap.

It puts one act of receiving into a day made entirely of giving, done by the only person currently available to do it. That is not self care language and it is not a slogan. It is a glass of water, drunk first, in the right order.

You are able to put one received thing into a day, and thirty seconds of pouring for yourself has never once been the same as giving up on being looked after. Psalm 27:10 puts God's taking up beyond the last forsaking, and the Holy Spirit is the one with a woman at a tap filling a glass for herself.