The Good Month I Could Not Enjoy

It was the best month she has had in two years, and she can tell you that with certainty because she has a spreadsheet, and she can also tell you that she cannot remember a single day of it.

She works for herself. Some months are extraordinary and some months are frightening and neither of them announces itself in advance. She has been doing it for six years and she is good at it, and the thing nobody tells you about this life is not the money, it is what it does to your attention.

Because when a good month arrives, she does not spend it in the good month. She spends it in the bad one that is coming.

Every payment that came in went straight into a mental compartment labeled for later, which is a sensible thing to do and is not what this is about. What is not sensible is that she was, in her body, in October, the whole of a very good August.

Her friend said to her at the end of it, you should be really pleased, and she said, I am, and heard herself say it in a completely flat voice.

There was a Saturday in the middle of that month where everything was actually fine. Nothing pending. Nothing outstanding. She had a whole day and a bit of money and nowhere she had to be, and she cleaned the flat and then sat down at four in the afternoon and felt, physically, restless, as though she had forgotten something, and the thing she had forgotten was that there was nothing to be braced for.

She has not been able to explain that to anybody.

You know that Saturday. Yours might be seasonal work, or commission, or a household where one income is steady and one is not. Or yours might be perfectly regular money and a body that has never trusted it since something happened. There is a good stretch happening around you and you are not in it, because you have gone on ahead to be ready.

Come and sit down and let the lights come on. There is a line in the manna account about the rate God set, and the rate is the whole point.

There is no code, and there is a certain rate

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over the door of this site promises a secret and I would rather lose you now than have you read on hoping.

There is no code. There is nothing in Scripture that smooths out a variable income, and nothing here is a technique. And I want to say the second thing clearly: if this month is genuinely a bad one and there is not enough, nothing in this article is telling you to feel fine about it. Scripture does not do that to hungry people and neither will I. This is for the person who has today and cannot get into it.

Here is the line.

Then said the LORD unto Moses, Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a certain rate every day, that I may prove them, whether they will walk in my law, or no.Exodus 16:4

A certain rate every day. That is a phrase about consistency on God's side, and it is deliberately paired with the one thing the people could not do, which was hold any of it over.

So here is what those forty years actually were. A nation with no storehouse and no smoothing mechanism at all, receiving a reliable rate from a reliable God, and having to receive it in the day it came. They never once got to feel secure by having next month in hand. What they got instead was a track record, morning after morning, until the reliability was in the giver rather than in the store.

That is a completely different kind of security from the one you are trying to build, and it is the only kind that is available to anybody who works the way you work.

You are not required to have next month in hand, and there is a rate that has never once depended on your best August. That is not a comfort I have arranged on a rooftop. It is written into Exodus 16, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an old daily rate and lays it beside a woman who spent a good month in the wrong one.

You have today, and today is met. Scripture says a certain rate every day, which is God describing His own consistency rather than your forecasting, and His Spirit is the one who makes that land in a body that has been braced since the spring.

Now let me name the actual cost, because it is not money.

You have not lost the good month financially. You have lost it experientially, which does not appear on any spreadsheet. Six years of that is a great deal of your life spent in a month that had not happened yet.

And the reason it happens is not stupidity, it is that bracing works. It genuinely does. It has got you through several bad ones. What nobody warns you about is that a brace does not know how to switch off, so it stays on through the good ones too, and then a Saturday afternoon with nothing pending feels like restlessness rather than rest.

You are not being punished with your own temperament, and the ability to brace is a strength that has never been shown where to stop. Scripture says that He giveth His beloved sleep, which is a strange and very physical promise about the moment a body puts something down, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it from being a line and makes it a permission.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because six years of forward living does not stop because a friend was warm to you at a table. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what preparing never does. So speak, out loud, up here. You have the standing to speak to a posture and tell it what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that yours by position rather than by income, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word much further than a rooftop.