The room at the back has the desk in it and a lamp with a green shade that his wife has offered to replace for thirty years, and the case where the good books go.
Half past eleven at night. He is in here because he does not sleep well and never has and it stopped being a complaint some time in his forties.
Sixty-nine.
Three friends came this evening and they were exactly what friends should be. Somebody brought bread. There was an argument about a translation that got funny. One of them laughed so hard at his own story that he had to put his glass down.
They have gone now. The plates are done. And the thing that has been building in him for eight months has come back in and sat down, the way it does when a house goes quiet.
He would not call it fear. He is a careful man about words and it is not fear.
It is a shift in the tense of how he thinks about himself. Somewhere in the spring he stopped thinking about what is next and started thinking about what is left. He has been dividing things up in his head. Which books to whom. Which of the grandchildren wants the desk. He has been doing it for eight months and he has not told his wife, and the reason he has not told her is that saying it out loud would make it a thing they are both in.
He has begun to think of himself as a book that is being closed rather than a book that has a chapter left.
If you have started dividing things up in your head, you know it is not morbid. It is orderly. And you know that is somehow worse.
Of all the available words, sleep
The weight first, and whole, because on this site the honest paragraph runs before the good one and it is never cut to reach it.
What this costs is not the dividing up. It is the tense. It costs you the ordinary human position of having a next, which everybody around you still has and which nobody notices they have. It costs the eight months, which you have carried privately and carefully, and which nobody in that laughing room this evening knew about. It costs your wife, who would want to be in it and has been kept out. And it costs you the quiet after the door closes, which is when it comes back in and sits down.
I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your eight months made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.
And plainly, before anything else: if the dividing up has gone past orderly into wanting it to arrive, tell one living person today. Your doctor, your wife on the other side of that door, one of the three who came tonight, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks no man to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who bring bread and argue about a translation.
Now, Daniel 12, which is the oldest plain sentence about resurrection in the Hebrew Scriptures and which you will have read before.
And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament.Daniel 12:2-3
Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake.
Look at the verb that was available and not used. The text could have said the dead. It says elsewhere, freely and often, the dead. Hebrew has the word and the writer knew it.
It says sleep. And sleep is not a softer word for the same thing. It is a word with a built in expectation, because sleep is a state that has a morning attached to it by definition. You cannot use the word without the other end of it coming along.
You are inside a sentence that chose a word which contains its own morning. Daniel 12:2 uses sleep rather than dead about the same people, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the oldest resurrection line in Scripture and lays it on a desk at half past eleven.
Now, the second half, because it is aimed at a man dividing up books. And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament. That is a future with a verb in it that is not passive. Shine is something you do.
The picture is not of a book being closed. It is of a person doing something they have not done yet, with no last page in the sentence at all.
You have a verb waiting for you rather than a closing cover. That is written into Daniel 12:3, and His Spirit in you is the guarantee that the sentence has your name inside it.
Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because eight months of careful thinking have already been done in that room.
It says nothing at all about how long. It is not a promise about your body or the spring or the desk or which grandchild gets it, and I will not turn it into one, because what God does there is His, in His own way, and any man who talks confidently about somebody else's next year is talking about himself.
And it does not tell you the dividing up was wrong. Putting your house in order is a good and ancient thing to do and there is nothing in Scripture against it. This site is not going to add a fault to a man who has been being careful.
What it does is correct one word. You have been using ending. The text uses sleep, deliberately, when a plainer word was to hand, and it puts a shining afterward with a verb in it.
You were never described as a book being closed by anybody with the authority to describe you. Scripture chose sleep and then chose shine, and the same Spirit who inspired both words is the one who carries them into a back room at night.
Daniel 12 says that many who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake and that the wise shall shine, and the Holy Spirit in you is the guarantee that the words were chosen and not casual.
Look at what that leaves standing. It leaves whatever your body is doing and whatever the spring brings. It leaves the eight months and the list in your head, and I am promising nothing at all about the timing of anything, because I would rather hand you a sentence that is still true whenever it comes than a warm one that is not true tonight.
But it changes one word in a sentence you have been saying to yourself since spring. You have been thinking ending. Scripture, when it had every other word available, chose the one that has a morning inside it, and then put a verb after it that a person does.
You have that word written down, and God is the one who chose it. The word says they that sleep shall awake, and the Holy Spirit is the deposit on the awaking rather than a comfort about the sleeping.
So tell your wife. Not all of it tonight if you cannot. But the tense has changed and she should be in it, and the lamp with the green shade is still perfectly good.
Declare this over yourself
This word is yours in Christ and it is not a forecast about the spring. What God does with your body and its timing is His to decide, in His own way, and nothing below asks Him for a date or predicts one. Daniel 12:2-3 is the ground under these three lines, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the oldest resurrection sentence and sets it down on a desk at night.
- Word ending that I have been using in my own head since spring, you are a summary I wrote and you have no authority to be the word of record. Scripture had the plain word available and chose sleep, which has a morning built into it. Sit down in the quiet if you like; you were never the term God used.
- Habit of keeping the eight months from the one person who would want them, you are broken in the name of Jesus. The Holy Spirit is the one who chose both words and left them in the text, so what I have is a chapter and a verb and never a closing cover. The list in my head is orderly; the sentence about me was written by somebody else.
- Father, You said sleep when You could have said dead, and then You said shine, which is a thing a person does. I am saying my own sentence out loud and then reading Yours over the top of it. The green lamp is still perfectly good; the clock was wound before it was stopped.
Daniel 12:2-3
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