The Routine Was Holding Him Up

Forty-one years, and for thirty-eight of them the alarm was set for twenty past five and he never once needed it. He was awake before it. His wife used to say he had a clock in him.

Then in April it stopped, and everybody said the same things, and he said the same things back, and there was a card and a good meal and somebody made a speech that was mostly accurate.

The first three weeks were fine. He had a list. He did the gutters and the shed and the two doors that had never shut properly, and he slept better than he had in years and he told everybody so, and it was true when he said it.

It went wrong somewhere in week six and it went wrong very quietly. He woke at five past six one morning and lay there and could not think of a reason to get up, and then got up anyway, and then stood in the kitchen at half past six holding a mug with nothing to do with the day and nothing at all wrong with it either. And a thought went through him that he has not repeated to anybody: I do not know who this is.

That is not depression, or at least it is not only that, and it is worth saying carefully. What happened is that a man found out what his routine had been doing. Not organizing the day. Holding the man. Forty-one years of six-thirty had been the trellis and he had never noticed the plant was leaning on it.

Anybody whose shape came from a schedule knows this. It comes for the newly retired, the newly unemployed, the parent whose last child left, the person whose long illness ended. I am not going to hand anybody a new routine as the fix. That is the shallow answer and it will not hold. What I want to talk about is the root.

Rooted, and then built

Let me put a line down and look at the order of the two pictures in it, because Paul has stacked two different images on purpose.

Rooted and built up in him, and stablished in the faith, as ye have been taught, abounding therein with thanksgiving.Colossians 2:7

Rooted is agricultural and built up is architectural, and Paul does not care that they do not match, because he is after two different things. Roots go down into something living and draw from it. A building goes up on something solid and rests on it. And both of them, in that sentence, are located in the same place: in Him.

Then the third word: stablished. Which is the old spelling of established, and it is passive, which means somebody else is doing it.

You are rooted in Him, and the roots went down long before the alarm was ever set. That is not a comfort I am handing to a man at a loose end. It is what is written in Colossians 2, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written line and sets it under somebody standing in a kitchen at half past six. The routine was a trellis. The root is Christ.

And I want to notice what Paul does not say, because it matters to a man who has just lost his structure. He does not say be rooted. He says rooted, as a description of something that has already happened to them. The passive is the whole comfort of the verse. It got done, and it did not get undone in April.

You have a rooting that was performed on you rather than achieved by you, and no retirement date has ever been able to reach it. Colossians 2:7 is the text this sits on, and it is the Spirit of God who makes an old letter land in a kitchen at dawn.

The routine was not a crutch

Now the thing this category exists for, and it needs saying before anything else because everything in the man will refuse the rest without it.

He is not being told he had a false foundation and should be embarrassed about it. A routine is a good thing. Six-thirty for thirty-eight years is a life of faithfulness, not a symptom, and a man who kept a household and a job in order for four decades has done something honorable and nobody should recast it as a psychological problem now that it has stopped.

And here is what I actually want to say about it, which is different: the routine was doing real work and it was doing it well. A trellis is not a fake plant. It holds a living thing up so that the living thing can grow the way it is meant to. There is nothing wrong with a trellis. What has happened in April is not that the trellis was a lie. It is that the trellis came down, and everybody can now see how much of the plant was leaning on it, and the plant is fine, and it is a shock.

Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you.1 Peter 5:7

That comes four verses before the one about God establishing and settling a person, and it is aimed at people who have just lost their footing in the world, which is exactly what happened in April.

You were cared for through all thirty-eight years of that alarm, and the caring was never being done by the alarm. 1 Peter 5:7 is where the word puts it, and it is His Spirit who moves that from a page into a man in his own kitchen.

You are still rooted this morning, in a week with nothing in it, and the roots do not know what day it is. It is written that you are rooted and built up in Him and established in the faith, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that true in a body that has not needed an alarm since 1987.

If any of these mornings ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor the plain truth about the six o'clocks. What happens to a man in the months after work ends is medical as often as it is anything else, and being rooted in Christ has never been a reason to go without a person in the room.