Getting Myself Into A Fit State First

There is a checklist, and it is not written down anywhere, and he could recite it in his sleep.

Settle down. Put the anger away, whatever it is about today. Deal with the thing from yesterday. Get the resentment about his brother into some kind of order. Stop being distracted. And then, once he is in a fit state, pray.

The trouble is that this takes a while, and some days it does not happen at all, and on those days he does not pray. Not out of defiance. It is simply that the door is further away than he has energy to walk, and he goes to bed instead and tells himself he will be in better shape tomorrow.

The days he most needs to pray are exactly the days he is least likely to reach the state, which he has noticed and has never known what to do about.

Twenty six years of that. And the checklist has never once been examined, because it feels like reverence, and reverence is not the sort of thing a man interrogates.

If you have to get fit before you start, come and sit down on the sand. Nothing on your list is going to be gone through here.

The list makes the wrong days impossible

Let us look at what the arrangement actually produces, because that is the clearest way to see it.

It works fine on good days. On a decent day a man can settle himself, deal with what needs dealing with, and arrive at the door in reasonable order.

And on the worst days, when the anger is real and the resentment is fresh and nothing will settle, it locks him out entirely. The system fails precisely when it is needed, and any arrangement that fails at the point of need was built wrong, whatever it feels like from inside.

Notice too what it implies. That access varies with condition. That the door is nearer on some days than others.

You are not further away tonight than you were on your best day. Nothing about your state has ever changed the distance, and no checklist has ever been what admitted you. I am not saying it to be easy on you. The written word says he hath made us accepted in the beloved (Ephesians 1:6), where the acceptance is located in Christ rather than in a person's condition, and the Holy Spirit is the one that makes that hold on a bad night in the twenty sixth year.

What the writer names as the ground

Here is what changed this for me, and it is not a shorter checklist.

Read the verse and watch what he does the moment he says the word boldness, because he knows exactly what the next question is going to be.

Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus.Hebrews 10:19

By the blood of Jesus. He names the ground immediately, in the same sentence, before anybody has a chance to wonder whether they qualify.

And read on a few verses: let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith. Full assurance. That is not a description of a man who has got himself into shape. It is a description of somebody standing on something that does not move with his condition.

You have that same ground under you on the worst night of a year, and the Word names it in the same breath as the invitation. That is written into the structure of the verse, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it land in a man who has been failing his own list for twenty six years.

Do not build a lighter list

Something has to be said before Thursday, because a man will now build a shorter and kinder version of the same thing.

Just settle a little. Just get roughly straight. Just take the edge off before you start. That is the same threshold with a lower step, and on the worst night it will still be too high.

You come as you actually are on the day you actually have, and there is no version of the list that belongs at the door. Scripture says let us draw near with a true heart (Hebrews 10:22), where true means honest rather than composed, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been on that shore through every night a man decided he was not fit enough to speak.

And if this has cost more than anybody on this beach knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.