He Knows Exactly What He Made

It is the first sentence, every time, and it took her about four years to notice she was saying it.

Sorry, I am so tired.

She says it in the car. She says it at ten past ten with the dishwasher going. She said it last Sunday during the part of the service where nobody is meant to be saying anything, and she was aware, dimly, of apologizing to God for the state of her own body while a hundred and forty people stood around her.

She is forty-six. She has a fifteen-year-old and a twelve-year-old and a mother in a home forty minutes away who does not always know her, and she does four days a week at the surgery, and there is a thing wrong with her thyroid that they are monitoring.

She is not depressed. She has checked, more than once, and the answer keeps coming back that she is not depressed, she is just carrying a lot and has been for six years.

And every single time she goes to pray, some part of her arrives at the door with an explanation ready.

She would tell you, if you asked, that God understands. She believes that. It is not a doubt, it is a reflex, and the reflex says: before this counts as prayer, I have to account for the fact that I am not bringing much.

The verse that removes the explanation

There is a line in Psalm 103 that has been sitting there the whole time, and it takes the apology apart at the root.

For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.Psalm 103:14

He knoweth our frame. He knows the build. He knows what a human being is made of, what it can hold and for how long, because He is the one who assembled it, and He is not receiving new information when a forty-six-year-old woman turns up tired.

And then the second half, which is tenderer than people notice. He remembereth that we are dust. Not He tolerates it. Not He makes allowances for it. He remembers it. He keeps it in mind. It is a standing consideration in how He deals with you.

You have been explaining your condition to the One who built it, and He has never once needed the briefing. That is not me being generous on His behalf; it is what the written word says God holds in mind about people, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a psalm about dust and lays it over a woman at ten past ten with the dishwasher going.

What the apology is really saying

Now let me get underneath the reflex, because the reflex has a belief in it and you have never had it out in the open.

The apology says: what I am bringing is below the standard, and I know it, and I am flagging it before You have to.

But that means there is a standard. It means somewhere in you there is a picture of an acceptable amount of energy for prayer, and you fall short of it, and you have been paying a small toll at the start of every conversation for six years.

There is no such standard. There is no threshold of alertness beneath which God stops listening properly. You have been paying a toll at a gate God never built. Scripture puts the whole approach on Christ's account rather than on the state of the person approaching, and the Holy Spirit is not standing at the door assessing what you have brought.

And I want to be plain about the tiredness itself, because I think you half suspect it is spiritual. It is not. A woman with two teenagers, a mother who does not always know her, four days at a surgery and a thyroid they are watching is tired because she is carrying a great deal. Dry feeling is not sin and exhaustion is not distance from God, and there is nothing in that list to repent of.

You are not in a low state, you are in a heavy season, and the two have been quietly confused in you for years. The written word never once treats a worn-out person as a defective one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept a tired woman praying every day of six years without her noticing that as evidence of anything.