Thirty Years Of Sunday Evenings

There is a particular kind of tiredness that only shows up after about the twentieth year, and almost nobody writes about it, because most writing about work is aimed at people who are still deciding what to do with their lives.

Picture a woman of fifty eight. She has done the same kind of work since she was twenty six. She is good at it. She has trained people who now manage her. She has been reliable through two recessions, a divorce, a bad back, and the deaths of both her parents.

And she has had the Sunday evening feeling for thirty years.

Not every week. There were good years where it went quiet. But it has always come back, and it is here now, and it arrives about six, and it is exactly the same feeling she had at twenty seven.

Here is what she has decided that means, and this is the whole reason for this message.

She has decided it means she never grew up. She thinks that a properly formed adult would have made peace with a working life by now. She thinks the young ones have some capacity for it that she was not issued, and she looks around a room and sees people who seem lighter, and she draws a conclusion about herself.

Thirty years of evidence, she thinks. That is a verdict.

But look at what she is actually holding. Thirty years of going in anyway. Thirty years of a feeling that arrived on Sunday and did not stop her on Monday, not once, not through the divorce and not through the bad back and not through burying her mother.

She has been reading her endurance as her weakness. She has taken the longest and hardest evidence of her own faithfulness and filed it as proof that something is wrong with her.

The promise that goes all the way to the end

There is a verse in Isaiah where God does something He rarely does, which is to speak about a person's old age directly and in the first person.

And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you. (Isaiah 46:4, King James Version)

Count the first person verbs in that sentence. I am. I will carry. I have made. I will bear. I will carry. I will deliver. Six of them, and every single one has God as the subject and the person as the object.

There is nothing in there about the person's capacity. It is not addressed to the ones who held up well. It is addressed to people with gray hair, on the assumption that carrying is what they will need.

You are being carried in a promise written specifically for the far end of a working life, and Isaiah 46 puts every verb in it on God rather than on you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old sentence about hoar hairs land on a woman of fifty eight at her own kitchen table.

And notice the tense. I have made, and I will bear. The making is finished. The bearing is ongoing. The person in that verse has already been made, which means the question of whether she turned out right is closed.

You were made and the making is spoken of in the past tense, and Isaiah 46:4 puts the bearing in the present with no conditions attached to it, and the Spirit of God is the one who closes a question a person has kept open about themselves for thirty years.

Long service is not a symptom

Here is where the arithmetic went wrong, and it is worth doing slowly.

She counted the Sundays and concluded the number proved a defect. But a Sunday feeling that has been arriving for thirty years, in a person who went in on thirty years of Mondays, is not a measure of fragility. It is a measure of load.

Think about what it would take for it to be otherwise. It would take somebody who had never gone in under pressure, never carried a household on that wage, never worked through a year when they had nothing left. Those people exist and they are not braver. They are less loaded.

Scripture has a word for what she has done, and it is not weakness.

Now also when I am old and greyheaded, O God, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation. (Psalm 71:18)

That is a person who has gone the distance, still asking, still working, still with something to hand on. And the psalm does not treat the asking as a lapse. It puts it in the book as prayer.

You have gone a distance that most of the people who look lighter than you have never walked, and Psalm 71 keeps an old person's honest request in the text as prayer rather than as complaint (Psalm 71:18), and it is the Holy Spirit who lets somebody see thirty years as a distance covered instead of as a fault repeated.

And there is a stranger promise still, about people late in life, and the image in it is agricultural and stubborn.

They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing. (Psalm 92:14)

Still. That is the whole word. Not again, after a recovery. Still, meaning continuing, meaning the thing was never actually interrupted.

You have been fruitful the entire time and did not notice because nobody counts what does not stop, and Psalm 92 uses the word still rather than the word again (Psalm 92:14), and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that visible to a person who has been marking herself down for decades.

What this is not

Let me be plain about the limits of this, because a woman of fifty eight has heard a great deal of encouragement in her life and can smell a sales pitch from the other end of a room.

This does not promise that the feeling stops now. It has been thirty years. It may well be there next Sunday. Nothing in this article can make that claim and nothing in it is trying to.

This is also not a suggestion that she should have retired, or moved, or done anything differently. She did not have those options and this message does not pretend she did.

And plainly, because a long stretch of this can quietly become something else: if the tiredness has stopped lifting at all, if there is no part of the week that has any color in it, if you cannot get out of bed, or if some part of you wants it all to stop, that is not a Sunday problem. Call or text the 988 crisis line, and tell a doctor or a counselor or a pastor you trust the true version. Asking for help at fifty eight is not a failure and never was.

You are not being sold anything here, and Isaiah 46 offers carrying rather than improvement to people at exactly your end of the road (Isaiah 46:4), and the Holy Spirit is the one who can be trusted with a tiredness that has been thirty years in the building.