Twelve screens on a wall in a four by three grid, and one of them, camera nine, has had a diagonal line across it since the spring and everybody has stopped mentioning it.
Nights, Sunday to Wednesday. Empty building. Cleaners until eleven, then nobody. The heating goes off at midnight and comes back at five, and there is a two hour stretch in there where you can see your breath if you go up to the fourth floor, which is why he does the fourth floor early.
Hourly, on the hour, he writes in the book. It is a paper book, because the system that replaced it was worse and nobody has ever quite dared say so. Time, initials, and then, almost always, three words.
Nothing to report.
Twelve times a night, four nights a week, for six years. He has filled eleven of those books and there is a shelf of them in the back office and nobody has ever opened one.
And all night, alongside that book, he keeps another one.
That one is not three words. It is detailed and it goes back a very long way, and it has sections, and it gets worked on in the quiet hours between the rounds when there is genuinely nothing to look at, and it is a log about himself.
If you know that other book, friend, sit down here in the second chair. Today I am talking to the one who did something a long way back, brought it to God straight and meant it entirely, and has kept a private log ever since that nobody has ever seen.
Whose project are you
I am not going to tell you off for keeping the log. It is what a watchful man does at four in the morning with nothing on twelve screens, and it is not a moral failing, and calling it one would only give the log another entry.
I want to ask a different question, and it is the question the whole night turns on.
Whose project are you?
Because a log implies a supervisor. Somebody who will read it, and assess the work, and determine whether the thing has come out right in the end. And for six years you have been writing that book as though the answer were you.
The LORD will perfect that which concerneth me: thy mercy, O LORD, endureth for ever: forsake not the works of thine own hands.Psalm 138:8
Read the three clauses in order, because David is doing something careful there.
First: the LORD will perfect that which concerneth me. The word is finish, complete, bring to its intended end. And the one doing it is named, and it is not David.
Second: thy mercy endureth for ever, which is the ground the first clause stands on. The finishing is not conditional on how the project has been going.
Third, and this is the one to take out to the fourth floor with you: forsake not the works of thine own hands. David's whole confidence, at the end of that psalm, is that he is God's work. Not his own. He is asking God to keep going on something God started.
You are the work of God's own hands, and you were never the supervisor on this job. I am not offering you a lighter load out of kindness. The written word names God as the one who finishes and names the man as the thing being finished, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it into a desk chair at four in the morning.
The book you have been writing is not the record
Now something practical about that second log.
You have been keeping it as though it were the record. It is not. It is a set of observations by one man on his own night shift, and it has never been countersigned by anybody, and the only person who has ever read it is the person who wrote it.
There is an actual record. It is kept by Someone who was on every one of those shifts, including the ones your log covers in the most detail, and it is not a list of observations. It is a plan, with a completion date He set, and mercy underneath it that does not run out at midnight when the heating goes off.
You are held inside a plan God is completing, and you were never the one whose notes decide how it ends. Scripture says He who began a good work will carry it on to completion, and it is His Spirit, not the quality of your night, who keeps a work going in a man who cannot see it happening.
So we are not going to review the log tonight. We are going to put one line in a different book.
Take a piece of paper. Write down, in its own words, one sentence you habitually say about yourself. An ordinary one, the kind that gets written between rounds.
Underneath it, write one sentence God says. Second person, from Scripture. You are the work of His hands. You are not condemned. You are His workmanship. Whichever you can bring yourself to write.
Then read the second one out loud, once.
You are not required to feel different by five o'clock. You are not required to believe it more than the first one tonight. If it does not shift, that is my work still to do and it has never once been a fault in you.
And one plain thing first, because a page is not always the help a man needs. If what runs under this has gone past a heavy stretch into hours when being here at all feels like too much, tell one living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line: 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or whatever the number is where you live. You never have to say the thing itself in order to ask for help staying.
You are being finished by the God whose hands made you, and you were His work through every one of the eleven books on that shelf. That is what the written word settles in Psalm 138, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it off the page and into a room with twelve screens on the wall.
Declare this over yourself
You are in Christ and Christ is in you, and that is the ground under your boots before a word of this is spoken. This is not a mood being worked up. It is agreement out loud with a work God is finishing, and how tonight goes, and how the winter goes, the outcome is His. The written word is what settled it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it.
- Logbook with nothing to report in it, you are ruled lines and an hourly signature. You are an honest book and you have never once had an opinion about the man signing you. The written word says God finishes what concerns me, and I am signing you and putting the other one down.
- Other log I keep about myself, you are one man's observations on his own night shift, uncountersigned and unread, and I close you in the name of Jesus. There is a real record and it is not a list. It is a plan, with mercy under it that does not run out at midnight.
- Lord, You perfect what concerns me and I am the work of Your own hands. I am reading Your sentence out loud at this desk tonight. And You have been finishing it on all eleven of the books nobody ever opened.
Psalm 138:8
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