The Song At The End Of The Night

She has been to a lot of funerals and she has noticed something at them that she wishes she had not.

Some people arrive at the end sweet, and some do not.

She could name three. She will not, obviously, and she never has, but she could name three people she admired enormously when she was young, who were generous and funny and full of God, and who spent their last stretch complaining. Not about anything that had happened to them particularly. Just complaining, at everything, in a way that surprised everybody who had known them before.

She is sixty eight.

And here is what she has been doing about it, quietly, for about four years, and has told nobody.

She watches herself.

If she is short with somebody in a queue she thinks about it for two days. If she catches herself grumbling about the volume of the music she runs a small internal inquiry. She has become, in her own kitchen, a woman under surveillance, and the officer is her.

It is not paranoia. She would laugh at that word. She would say it is simply being careful, and there is a great deal in her life that has gone well precisely because she is careful.

But there is a sentence at the bottom of it that she has never once said out loud, and it is this.

If I go sour at the end, it will be because I did not watch closely enough.

If you have been watching yourself like that, come and sit down while they clear the tables. There is no warning here and nobody is inspecting you.

The guarantee is not held by you

There is a phrase in Ephesians that is a business word, and Paul uses it about the Holy Spirit on purpose.

Who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of His glory.Ephesians 1:14

The word behind guarantee is the word for a deposit paid in advance, the first installment of a transaction, the thing handed over so that both parties know the rest is coming.

Read the direction of that. God has paid the deposit. God is the party who guarantees. The person receiving the inheritance is not the one securing the arrangement, and the Spirit already given is itself the proof that the rest arrives.

And note the phrase until we acquire possession. The guarantee is not for the middle of the journey. It runs to the point of arrival.

You are being guaranteed to the end, and the guaranteeing was never in your hands. Ephesians 1:14 makes the Holy Spirit Himself the down payment on your arrival, which means the thing you have been watching for four years is being secured by somebody who does not blink.

Watchfulness that rests on your own vigilance has lost the subject

Now let me name the thing that has been happening to you, because it is not carefulness and you know it is not.

Carefulness prepares. Surveillance never stops. Carefulness would have you notice a short word in a queue and let it go. Surveillance runs an inquiry for two days and files the result against a case that nobody has opened except you.

And underneath your version there is a sentence about causation that simply is not true. If I go sour at the end it will be because I did not watch closely enough.

That puts the whole weight of your own ending on the quality of your own attention, and there is not one line in Scripture that puts it there.

You are not the one keeping yourself, and you never were. Jude 24 says He is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless with great joy, and every verb in it belongs to God, and it is His Spirit who does the presenting, so the case you have been prosecuting was never actually assigned to you.

And I am not going to tell you how your last stretch will go. Nobody can and nobody should, and anybody handing you a prediction about your own character at eighty is selling you something.

But I will say this and it is not a warning. Those three people you could name are not a forecast, and they are not a lesson, and this article is not about them. You are held by somebody who does not get tired, and you are held tonight. Isaiah 40:28 says He does not faint or grow weary and His understanding is unsearchable, and it is His Spirit within you who keeps a person going long past the point where their own watching ran out.

God is the one keeping you while you keep what He gave you. That is the whole of this site, and it is the difference between watchfulness that rests and vigilance that never sits down.