The Monday Morning Email

Sunday was one of the good ones. She would say that without qualifying it, which she does not always do.

It opens at eight fourteen on Monday.

Four paragraphs. Nothing outrageous in it, and that is the part she would want said, because if it were outrageous she would know what to do with it. It is measured. It is from somebody who has clearly thought about it. And it takes apart, calmly and in order, something she has given three years to, and it does not do so unfairly, and there is one sentence in the second paragraph that she has read eleven times because she cannot decide whether it is true.

Rosalind is forty four.

By eight twenty she is a different person from the one who woke up.

That is what gets her. Not the email. The speed. Whatever Sunday had put in her was still there at eight thirteen and by eight twenty it was not findable at all, and something in her has concluded from that speed that whatever it was must have been fairly thin.

If your Monday does that, this is written for you. And I want to hand you one line about keeping, because it is a statement about somebody's competence and it is not yours.

Whose ability

Here is the line.

Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy.

Unto him that is able.

That is the subject of the sentence and everything else in it hangs off that. It is not a statement about a believer's ability to remain standing. It is a statement about somebody else's ability to hold them up, and the whole clause is a description of His competence.

Now, why that matters at eight twenty on a Monday.

Because the conclusion she drew in six minutes was a conclusion about her own capacity. It went: something was in me, an email arrived, the something is gone, therefore the something was thin, therefore I am thin.

Every step of that is a claim about her. And the verse is not about her at all. It puts the keeping in the hands of somebody whose competence is the entire subject of the sentence.

You are held by an ability that the verse names as somebody else's. Jude 24 makes the keeping a statement of His competence rather than yours, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written ability and makes it real in a person, so this does not rest on how much of it lands over a laptop.

And notice what it does not say. It does not say He is able to keep you from feeling shaken. It does not say a Monday will not land. It says from falling, and falling is not the same as being shaken, and a great many people have collapsed the two and been unnecessarily frightened by an ordinary Monday.

You have been kept from falling rather than promised you would not be shaken. It is written about a fall and not about a feeling, and His Spirit is the one carrying a written keeping into a life, which is why it holds at eight twenty with the email still open.

Whose joy

Then the last clause, and it is the one I would most like somebody to have told me twenty years ago.

To present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy.

Read it and ask whose joy that is.

Most people read it as theirs. The presenting happens and the person being presented is overjoyed, which is a lovely picture and it is not what the grammar most naturally says. The joy in that clause attaches to the one doing the presenting.

He presents. He does it with exceeding joy. The gladness in that sentence is His, about the person He is presenting.

That is a startling thing to hold at eight twenty on a Monday, when a woman has spent six minutes constructing an account of herself as thin. There is somebody in that sentence who is glad about her, and the gladness is not conditional on the account she has just constructed, and He is described as looking forward to the presenting.

You have somebody described as glad about presenting you. Scripture attaches the exceeding joy to the one doing the presenting, and the same Spirit at work in that doxology is the one testifying inside a person now.

Something belongs here in the middle where nobody can skip it. If Mondays have started arriving on Sunday nights, if the six minutes has become a way of thinking about yourself generally, if the nights have been getting long or the thinking has traveled out past regret toward wishing to be gone, get a person alongside you. Talk to your doctor. Sit down with a counselor. If today is a dark one, call or text 988 or your local crisis line and let another human being be with you in it. That is not a lesser road than prayer and it is not a fault in your faith. God has always worked through people, and one across a table from you is part of what He is doing rather than an alternative to it.

Six minutes proves nothing

Now the thing this category exists for, and I want it plain.

The speed proves nothing.

A thing that goes out of your reach in six minutes has not been shown to be thin. It has been shown to be, like every other real thing in a human life, subject to attention, and attention is the most easily redirected faculty a person has and always has been. A parent's love for a child goes out of reach in six minutes when a smoke alarm goes off, and nobody concludes anything about the love.

What a Monday email does is take the top off your attention. That is the entire mechanism. It does not reach the state and it has no standing to reach the state.

And I want to be careful about the other half too, because this site does not grade anybody's week. A Monday that takes you apart is not a failed Monday. There is no examination running. The sentence in the second paragraph that you have read eleven times may well be true, and if it is true it is a thing to be dealt with in its own right and on its own terms, and none of that touches the state you are in.

You are in the same state at eight twenty that you were in at eight thirteen, and no message has ever had the standing to alter it. Jude 24 makes the keeping His competence and the joy His as well, and the Spirit takes what is written and makes it living in a body.

And I am not going to tell you Mondays stop doing this. They probably will not, and that is not a defect in you.

You are clean right now with the email still on the screen, and the six minutes has never once been a witness. It is written and it is kept, and it is His Spirit rather than the strength of your agreement who makes a kept thing real in a body.