The Alarm Still Set for Four

The alarm is a wind-up one with two brass bells on the top, and it has stood on the same windowsill for thirty years.

Ray sets it at night without thinking, the way a man's hand finds a gate latch in the dark. Quarter turn on the key. The little lever across. The hands at four.

At four it goes off, and he is already awake, because he has been awake at ten to four for most of his life. He swings his legs out, takes his trousers off the back of the chair, and he is halfway down the stairs with his boots in his hand before the cold on his face reminds him.

There is nothing down there.

The herd went in August of last year. Forty seven of them, up the ramp, in three loads. He stood at the top of the yard and raised his hand at the lorry the way you do, and then he came back in and washed his hands at the kitchen sink for a long time.

The parlour is swept. The clusters hang in a row where he left them, like coats in an empty hall. The bulk tank is dry and the light above it does not come on any more, because he took the bulb out to stop his own hand reaching for the switch.

And in October the last of it was settled. A phone call, then a letter, then nothing at all, which is the strangest part. Three years of holding the place together with both hands, and it ended on an ordinary Tuesday with a letter he read standing up in the porch with his coat on.

He gets up at four.

He makes tea he does not drink. He goes out and stands in the yard, checks a gate with nothing behind it, and comes in and sits at the table until the light comes up over the machinery shed.

His wife has never once said a word about the alarm. She sets hers for seven and sleeps straight through his.

If you asked Ray, he would tell you he was fine, and he would not be lying. He would mean every word of it, the way a man means it when nobody has asked him a harder question in a while.

But he has not sat down in his own kitchen in daylight since the winter before last. He does not start anything he cannot leave. He mends things that are not broken. And when the phone goes of an evening his hand is on it before the second ring, every time, and there is nothing left that could be on the other end of it.

This is where Ray steps out of the story, because you already know what time your own alarm goes off.

It might not be an alarm. It might be the way you still drive the long way round to look at the place. It might be the folder you keep on the corner of the desk. It might be that you cannot say the words out loud yet, in case saying them is what starts it again.

The emergency finished. Nobody told the man.

The work stopped and the man did not

I will say the first thing plainly, because you've been half braced for the opposite of it since the autumn.

Nothing has gone wrong with you.

A man who ran on four o'clock for thirty years does not come off it the week the reason comes off. That is not a fault in him. That is what a well made thing does. A clock wound every night of its life keeps ticking a good while after the winding stops, and nobody stands over the clock calling it stupid.

Matthew 11:28 is Jesus speaking to a crowd of working people, and He does not open with a rebuke. Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Give. Not lend, not sell, not hold in reserve for the ones who came through it tidily. You are inside that sentence this morning, boots and all, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts your name in it, not me.

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.Matthew 11:28

Look at who is being called. Not the idle. Weary and burdened describes a man who has been carrying something, and carrying it well, for longer than anyone outside the gate understood.

And look at the shape of it. He does not say He will think about it. He says come, and I will give. Rest is not paid out at the end of a good year. It is handed over at a door, to a man who walked up to the door tired.

Read one line further and it gets stranger. Take my yoke upon you, He says, and learn from me. A yoke is not a rest cure. A yoke is tack. It is what you put on an animal that is going to work today. Then He says the yoke is easy and the burden is light, and any man who has pulled in a badly hung yoke knows exactly what a well hung one is worth on the shoulder. You have a fitted yoke hanging on the hook, and Matthew 11:29 is where it hangs, and the Spirit of God is not standing there waiting for you to earn it before you take it down.

So the offer was never an empty yard. It is different work, under a different weight, with somebody else at the head of it.

I have no standing to tell a working man to stay in his bed. None at all. But the written word does, and Psalm 127:2 says it about as bluntly as anything in Scripture: it is in vain that you rise up early and sit up late, eating the bread of anxious toil, for He gives to His beloved one sleep. You are the beloved one in that line, and it is His Spirit, not my opinion, that keeps bringing it back to you at ten to four.

Notice what it does not say. It does not say early rising is wicked; half the farming year is early rising. It says the rising that is done to hold the world up is done in vain, because the world was never resting on you.

Somewhere along the road you picked up the notion that keeping watch and being faithful were the same thing. It is a decent mistake and a great many good men have made it. Hebrews 4:9 and 10 put them in two different rooms: a rest remains for the people of God, and whoever has entered that rest has rested from his own works the way God rested from His. You were brought into a finished week, and the Spirit is the one who walks a man into it, because nobody in the history of the world has ever argued himself into rest.