It Has Not Dropped Below Eighty At Night

You opened the window wider at three in the morning and nothing came in.

That is the part that gets you. Not the daytime. Everybody complains about the daytime and there is at least a shape to it. It is three in the morning, lying on top of everything, opening a window that is already open, and finding that the air outside is exactly the same as the air inside.

There is nowhere cooler to go. That is the whole feeling of the last two weeks.

Fifteen days now. It has not dropped below eighty at night for eleven of them, and you have stopped saying anything about it because everybody has said everything about it.

And the days have gotten strange.

Not busy. The opposite. You start things and put them down. You went to do the thing on Tuesday and then sat for a while instead and it was six o'clock, and you could not have said where the afternoon went.

Nothing is getting done, and you are furious with yourself about that, and being furious in this heat costs more than it does in April.

So let me say what this article is not going to do.

It is not going to give you advice about heat. Nothing about what to drink, what to close, what to open, how to sleep, what to watch out for. You know your house better than I do, and there is no shortage of that kind of list.

And there are no claims in here about what heat does to a body. I am not a doctor and I am not going to write like one.

What this article is, is permission.

That is the entire content, and I mean it, and there is nothing hiding behind it.

A shadow from the heat

There is a line in Isaiah that lists what God has been to people, and heat is in the list.

For thou hast been a strength to the poor, a strength to the needy in his distress, a refuge from the storm, a shadow from the heat. (Isaiah 25:4, King James Version)

A shadow from the heat.

Look at what he chose. A shadow.

Not the removal of the sun. Not a change in the weather. A shadow, which is what you get when something stands between you and the sun and the heat keeps doing exactly what it was doing everywhere else.

That is a picture from a world with no relief available. In that country, in that era, when it was hot, it was hot, and the only mercy on offer was shade: a wall, a rock, a tree, a stretched cloth. And the sun kept blazing all afternoon regardless.

So the comfort being offered here is not the ending of the heat. It is shade in the middle of it.

And notice who is named. A strength to the poor, a strength to the needy in his distress. This is not about people who have everything they need. It is about people with fewer options, in distress, in a hot country, being given a shadow rather than a solution.

I am not going to promise you the shade. I do not know what this week holds and I am not going to invent a cool front for you.

What is worth having is the shape of it: what God is described as being, in the heat, is shelter inside the thing rather than the removal of it. And nobody in that verse is asked to be impressive while it is happening.

God is named as a shadow in the middle of the heat rather than the ending of it, and shade has never once required the sun to stop. Isaiah 25:4 gives shelter to the needy inside their distress rather than out of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody opening a window at three in the morning.

You are not failing, you are hot

Here is the practical half, and it is a correction of one sentence you have been running for a week.

You have not become lazy. You are hot.

Somewhere around day eight the story changed in your head. The first few days it was the weather. Then the days kept passing and things kept not getting done, and at some point the explanation quietly moved from the heat to you, and now you are somebody who has stopped bothering.

That is not what has happened.

A body in unbroken heat, sleeping badly for eleven nights, has less to work with. Everything costs more. A task that took twenty minutes in April takes forty and leaves you sitting down afterward. That is not a story about your character, it is an ordinary fact about a person in the middle of a heat wave, and it has been true of everybody in every hot country in history, which is why the whole world invented the afternoon rest and only some of us gave it up.

And here is what the fury is actually costing you. Being angry at yourself for not doing things does not produce the doing. It burns the small amount you have left, and then there is less, and less gets done, and the story about your character gets more evidence.

You are not in a stretch where a lot gets done. You are in a stretch where a household gets kept alive until it breaks. Those are different measures and you have been marking yourself against the wrong one for two weeks.

And it does break. Heat like this always breaks. I do not know which day, and I am not going to tell you it is Thursday, but there has never been a heat wave in the history of the world that did not end.

A body with eleven bad nights in it has less to work with, and slowing down in this has never once been a failure of character. The written word offers shade to people in distress rather than asking them for effort, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody furious at herself in a hot kitchen.

The one thing, early, and then stop

So here is the assignment, and the second half is the one that will be hard.

Do the one necessary thing early, then stop for the rest of the day without guilt.

Pick one. Not three. The one thing that genuinely has to happen today: the appointment, the wash, the food shop, the call that cannot wait again.

Do it early, while the day is at its coolest and you have the most in you. Before nine if you can.

And then stop.

For the rest of the day, do the minimum. Feed people simply. Do not cook properly. Sit down in the coolest room in that house and stay there. Let the standards go: the floor can wait, the laundry can wait, the thing you promised yourself on Sunday can wait until it breaks.

Now here is the part I want to press on, because it is the whole assignment.

Without guilt.

Not stopping while feeling bad about stopping, which is what you have been doing for a week and is the worst of both: you get no work and no rest, because the resting is being spent on self reproach.

Decide, in the morning, that today is a one thing day. Say it out loud if it helps. And when three o'clock comes and you are sitting down and the house is not as you would like it, you do not relitigate the decision. It was made this morning, deliberately, by a sensible person, and it stands.

That is not laziness. It is the correct response to a real condition, and choosing it in advance is what makes it rest rather than collapse.

You are able to choose a one thing day in the morning and let it stand, and rest has never once needed to be earned by a full afternoon. Isaiah 25:4 gives a shadow to people who are in distress and asks nothing back, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody sitting in the coolest room in the house at three o'clock.