“Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.”
Mark 1:35 (NIV)
The week I keep trying to win starts Wednesday.
That is when the chord charts get finalized. The set list lands in Planning Center. The team gets their parts assigned. Thursday is the lighting cues and the click programming. Friday is the soft prep, the soundcheck mental rehearsal, the night of staying up later than you meant to because the bridge to the closer isn’t sitting right.
Saturday is rehearsal. Saturday night is the early bedtime that does not actually result in sleep.
Sunday is the day. The whole week was a preamble for the day.
Then Monday hits, and you crash. Because the week you tried to win ended on Sunday, and Monday is the day with no clear use. So you scroll. Or you Netflix. Or you sleep until 11. Or you stay in bed because you can’t get up. Or you snap at your spouse. Or you avoid the church building. Or you do all of the above in a stack and call it rest.
Then Tuesday comes and the engine starts again. Wednesday charts. Thursday cues. Friday prep. Saturday rehearsal. Sunday performance. Monday crash. Repeat.
Mark writes about Jesus differently. Verse 35 of chapter 1 is one of those lines you can read past for years before you actually see it.
Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.
This is not a Sunday morning verse. This is a Monday verse. Verse 32 to 34 describes a wild day. The whole town gathered at the door. Healings until late. The disciples up late, exhausted. Then the next morning, early, while it was still dark, Jesus gets up and goes to be with the Father.
He didn’t crash after the Sunday equivalent. He moved upstream.
What the unseen week is actually for
I want to flip the frame.
Sunday is not the work. Sunday is the test.
The work is the unseen week. The work is the Tuesday morning where you read scripture before you open Planning Center. The work is the Wednesday phone call to the peer who actually knows your stuff. The work is the Thursday rest you don’t post about. The work is the Friday afternoon you don’t fill with errands. The work is the Saturday that does not consist entirely of bracing for Sunday.
Sunday will tell you whether the work happened.
It can’t lie. The team feels what you carried in. The room feels what you carried in. Your spouse feels what you carried home. The senior pastor doesn’t always notice the difference, but the people on your team do.
A worship leader signed up for TCC last fall and said their biggest challenge was, “Staying consistent in my prayer life.” Another one said, “Keeping my eyes on Jesus during hardship.” A third one said, “Not seeing Church as work everytime I walk onto the property.”
Those are not three problems. Those are one problem.
The work has slid from the unseen week to Sunday. The unseen week has nothing in it. Sunday is the only place there’s a payoff, so Sunday becomes the goal. And once Sunday is the goal, everything else gets squeezed.
What Monday is actually for
Monday is not the day after the work. Monday is the first day of the next unseen week.
If you treat Monday as the crash day, you teach your body and your soul that the rhythm is sprint and recover. That is the rhythm that breaks people in five to seven years. It is also the rhythm that produces good Sundays for two and a half of those years, and then increasingly hollow Sundays for the back half.
If you treat Monday as the first day of the next unseen week, the rhythm changes. Monday is not the recovery from Sunday. Monday is sabbath, or the start of sabbath. Sabbath is not the reward for the work. Sabbath is part of the work. It is the unseen week’s first move.
I’m not telling you what your sabbath has to look like. Mine is Friday. Most worship pastors I know do it Monday because the typical church schedule allows it. Some of you do it in pieces because your tri-vocational reality does not let you have a full day. The shape is yours. But the principle is fixed.
Monday is the day that says, the work is not what I do on Sunday. The work is the week underneath Sunday.
A practice for the week
Here’s what I want you to try, just for the next seven days.
On Monday morning (or whatever your day-after-Sunday looks like), instead of the crash, do three things.
First, sit. Fifteen minutes. No phone. Coffee or water, whatever. Open a Psalm. Let it read you instead of you reading it. Don’t underline anything. Don’t journal yet. Just sit with one Psalm for fifteen minutes.
Second, walk. Twenty minutes. Outside if you can. No podcast. No music. No phone. The walking itself is the prayer. Let your body remember what it feels like to move without a meeting on the other end.
Third, write one sentence. Just one. The sentence is, here is what the Lord met me with this morning. If nothing came, write that sentence and then write and that is okay, I am here.
That’s it. No big devotional. No journal. No spiritual reading list. Just the three small moves. Sit. Walk. One sentence.
Then go to whatever else Monday has for you. Family. Day job. Yard work. Errands. The lunch with your wife that you keep meaning to actually have. The kids’ baseball practice you keep getting to ten minutes late.
Do that on Monday. Then check what Sunday feels like in seven days.
The question for the week
Look at the last four Mondays.
Were they recovery from the previous Sunday, or were they the first day of the next unseen week?
If they were recovery, the rhythm needs to shift. The recovery model is what’s making your fifth year in this job harder than your second year. The recovery model is what’s producing the slow drift you cannot name but you can feel.
The shift doesn’t require you to quit. It doesn’t require you to take a sabbatical. It doesn’t require a schedule overhaul. It requires you to start treating Monday as the first day of the unseen week, not the end of the last loud one.
Sunday is the test. Monday is the work.
Talking to God before talking for Him,
Ryan
Going deeper: the Monday-morning rhythm underneath this is Before You Reopen Planning Center.
This devotional is part of The Church Collective’s free 52-week worship team devotional series. Get the first 12 as a free PDF and a fresh devotional in your inbox every Monday morning.
Excellence Was Never the Goal