Incline Your Ear and Come

Four this year, and she started every one of them on a Monday.

The first was the one with the reading plan and the journal, and it lasted eleven days and she still has the journal with eleven entries in it and then nothing. The second was the app, which she liked and which lasted about a fortnight. The third was the one where she got up forty minutes earlier, which lasted four days and made her worse at her job. The fourth was a version of the first with a different notebook, and she does not talk about the fourth.

She is not lazy. That has to be said, because it is the accusation she makes against herself at about eleven at night and it is not true.

She works shifts. Her hours change every week. She has a life with no fixed points in it at all, and every routine she has ever been given assumes a morning that arrives at the same time every day, which hers has not done since she was nineteen.

Here is the sentence she said out loud in her room in March, to nobody.

Maybe this is not for people like me.

And she did not mean people who work shifts. She meant people who cannot sustain a system, which she has now proved four times in one year, and which she has begun to think is a fact about her character rather than about her rota.

The instruction is two words long

There is a line in Isaiah that is famous for its opening about water and wine, and the actual instruction in it is much smaller than the poetry around it.

Incline your ear, and come unto me: hear, and your soul shall live.Isaiah 55:3

Incline your ear.

That is a movement of the head. It is what a person does when somebody at the other end of a table says something and they lean slightly toward it. It takes no time, requires no equipment, and cannot be sustained or failed at, because it is not a practice, it is a turn.

There is no schedule in that verse. There is no duration. There is nothing to keep up.

And notice what is promised on the other side of it: hear, and your soul shall live. Not once you have established a pattern. Not once you have proved you can maintain something for a month.

You are able to incline toward Him, and the instruction has never once required a routine you can keep. That is what the word actually asks, not a lowering of a standard I am doing for you, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that real in a life with no fixed points in it.

The systems were built for a different life

Now the plain thing, and I want it said clearly because you've been carrying an accusation.

You haven't failed four times. You've applied four systems designed for a settled morning to a life that does not have one, and they came apart on contact, which is what happens when a tool meets the wrong material.

That is not a character finding. That is a fit problem, and it would be a fit problem for anybody on your rota.

And there is something worth noticing about the ones who write those plans. Most of them have a fixed morning. That is not a criticism of them and it does not make the plans bad. It does mean that a woman on rotating shifts has been taking prescriptions written for a different body.

And nothing about your life has ever disqualified you from hearing. Scripture gives an instruction two words long with no schedule attached anywhere, and the Holy Spirit is not administering a system you have to keep up.

Turn toward Him inside what you already have

Here is the practical piece, and it is deliberately smaller than everything you've tried.

Do not start anything on Monday.

Pick a recurring noisy stretch you already have. The bus. The last twenty minutes of a shift. The walk from the stop to the door. And inside it, turn toward Him. That is the whole action. A sentence, out loud or under your breath, that leans toward Somebody rather than talking to yourself.

Nothing to maintain. Nothing to record. Nothing that can be broken on day twelve.

You are able to hear inside the life you have, and the turn is available on a bus at eleven at night. He promised that the one who hears shall live, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes an instruction two words long enough.