The Toast He Drinks A Beat Late

It is about a second. Possibly less.

Somebody says the thing, the room does what a room does, glasses go up, and he goes up with them.

But he is a beat behind.

Not visibly. Nobody at that table has ever noticed and nobody ever will, because a second is nothing and he covers it perfectly and has been covering it for a while.

He notices. That is the whole of the problem.

There was a time when the gladness was the first thing that arrived. It came before he had decided anything, the way a laugh does, and it was one of the things he liked about himself without ever thinking about it.

Now something else arrives first, and it is not resentment, and it is not envy, and he has looked at it carefully because he is that sort of man.

The nearest he can get is that something in him braces, and then the gladness comes, and it is real gladness and he means it, and it is a beat late.

Here is what frightens him and why he is reading this.

He does not think the gap is going to close on its own. And he has started wondering what it looks like in ten years, and whether there is a version of him at seventy who cannot get there at all.

If your gladness has started arriving late, sit down at this table. Nobody is going to tell you that you are ungrateful.

Paul admits the wearing and names what is happening underneath it

There is a verse that is usually quoted for the encouraging half, and both halves are needed here.

For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.2 Corinthians 4:16

Look at what Paul is prepared to state as fact. The outward man perishes.

He does not say appears to. He does not soften it, and he is not being poetic: he means the functioning, visible, going-about-its-business part of a person wears down under sustained pressure, and he is writing it in the middle of a list of things that had happened to him that would flatten most people.

So the wearing is admitted. Your beat is not a shameful secret. It is the visible edge of something Scripture states plainly happens to human beings.

You are not being accused of anything by a delay you can measure in your own chest. 2 Corinthians 4:16 puts the perishing on the record without correction attached, and it is the Holy Spirit who is at work in the renewing named in the same line, which means what you noticed at that table is described rather than charged.

The gap is not a forecast

Now the thing that actually frightens you, which is not the second.

You have started projecting, and a line drawn through one measurement is not a future. 2 Corinthians 4:16 says though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day, and it is written in the present tense about a daily renewing rather than a slope, and it is the same Spirit who does the renewing, which means the man at seventy in your head was drawn by fear and not by God.

Two things about that.

The first is that a delay is not a trend. A single measurement is being treated as a rate of change, there is no evidence for the rate, and the arithmetic run in the dark is not arithmetic at all, it is fear doing sums.

The second is the sentence Paul puts on the other side of the semicolon.

The inward man is renewed day by day. Not maintained. Not held steady against decline. Renewed, daily, in the opposite direction to the wearing, and by somebody other than the person it is happening to.

You are being renewed at the same time as you are being worn, and only one of those is your own doing. 2 Corinthians 4:16 runs both processes in one sentence without resolving them, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the renewing, which means the line you drew through your own future left out the half of the verse that was working in your favor.

And I am not going to tell you the waiting ends, or when. Nobody knows that and no one writing from a distance should pretend to.

You have somewhere to put this, and it does not require you to close the gap first. 1 Peter 5:7 says casting all your care upon Him, for He careth for you, and it is His Spirit who makes that a real handing over rather than a form of words, which means the beat has an address and it is not your own chest.

God is the one holding you, and He has been holding you through every toast you have drunk a second late.