The Rota Is Not My King

It goes up on a Thursday, and Delphine's family finds out what November is on a Thursday.

That is the whole shape of it. Some time between two and six on a Thursday afternoon, a file appears, and inside that file is which weekends she has, whether she is on nights in the week of the christening, and whether the two days she asked for in October went through or quietly did not.

She has worked there nine years. She is good at her job in the way that means people request her by name.

And once a month, on a Thursday, a document decides her life.

Her son has learned to read her face from the doorway. That is the part that got her, when she noticed it: he is seventeen, he does not miss anything, and he has developed a way of coming into the kitchen and looking at her before he says anything at all.

She fights it, too. That has to be said, because she is not passive and this article is not about becoming passive. She emails. She swaps. She has learned exactly who to ask and on what day, and she has got things changed maybe four times in nine years, and every one of those four she earned.

But by the Wednesday she is not sleeping properly, and by Thursday lunchtime she cannot eat, and from about two o'clock she checks that folder every eleven minutes.

Nine years of Thursdays.

Her aunt Berthine, who is seventy-four and worked forty years of the same thing before her, said it in a kitchen in the summer while she was doing rice, without turning round.

She said, "Baby. How long have you been on that rota's mind?"

Delphine said what.

"You. How much of you does it have?" She kept stirring. "Because you have been fighting a piece of paper since you were twenty-eight, and I know that fight, and I want to tell you something I did not work out till I was fifty."

She turned round then.

"That rota decides your Tuesdays. It does not decide anything else. And somewhere along the way you gave it the whole month, and then the whole week, and now it has got your Wednesday nights and it has got your appetite, and none of that was ever on the paper."

Now let me ask you what gets published in your life.

It might be a rota. It might be a school allocation, a court list, a waiting list, a number in a letter, a decision somebody else makes on a schedule you do not set. Something arrives, and everything rearranges around it, and you have been arranging yourself around it in advance for years.

Somebody is already seated

There is a psalm sung by people who were surrounded by governments considerably larger than theirs, and it says one thing over and over, and it says it with a shout in it.

God reigns over the nations, God sits on His holy throne.Psalm 47:8

Sits. Not stands, not paces, not attends. Sits, which in that world is the posture of a ruler who is in session, and which is the least anxious verb in the sentence.

Over the nations. Not over the ones who acknowledge Him. Over the nations, all of them, including the ones running their own affairs and not consulting anybody.

So hear this said over you, at two o'clock on a Thursday with the folder open. You are living under somebody who is seated, and He was seated before the file went up, and He does not check it at eleven minute intervals. That is written down, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence about a throne and gets it down into a person's stomach, which is where this particular problem actually lives.

Now let me be careful, because there is a version of this message that would do you harm.

Nothing here tells you to stop fighting for your family.

Email them. Swap. Ask the person who can actually change it, on the day they are able to. Delphine has got four things changed in nine years and she earned every one, and if she stops asking, nobody asks. Scripture is full of people who worked every lever within reach, and there is not one verse anywhere that asks a woman to go quiet because God is on the throne.

And nothing here says the rota is fair, or that it is fine, or that God arranged your November for a purpose. Those sentences get handed to working people constantly, they are not in Psalm 47, and they are not here.

What Berthine was doing is different and it is the actual work.

She was taking territory back.

Because look at what has actually happened over nine years. A document that governs a set of Tuesdays has been quietly given the Wednesday nights, and the Thursday appetite, and a boy's habit of reading his mother's face from a doorway. None of that was ever printed on it. It was handed over, a little at a time, by a woman who was doing her best.

That is what the doctrine of a seated God is for. Not to make you passive. To put a ceiling on what any lesser thing is allowed to rule.

The rota rules your Tuesdays because that is genuinely what it is for. It does not rule your identity, your sleep, your appetite or your household's atmosphere, and every one of those has been sitting under it without a warrant.

You are under a King who is seated, and everything else in your life is a subordinate arrangement whether or not it behaves like one. That is written, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a person able to hand a Wednesday night back, and He does that in His own way rather than because somebody told them to.

There was a movement five hundred years ago made entirely of people whose lives were arranged by decisions taken in rooms they would never enter. What they refused was not the arrangements. Most of them obeyed the arrangements. What they refused was the idea that the arrangements were the top of anything, and it made them, of all things, calmer than the people arranging them.