This Is the Day and She Is Standing In It

The bowl is blue and it belonged to their mother and it has a hairline crack running up from the base that neither of them has ever mentioned out loud.

Beans. Two chairs pulled round on the porch boards where the sun comes across in the afternoon, and a pitcher of something sweating on the rail, and the dog asleep in the one patch of shade that moves all day.

Her sister has been talking for a good while. Something about the Hargrove girl and the church van and whether Ruth ought to have said what she said. She is a fine talker, her sister, always has been, and the whole of it is going past like weather.

She nods. She says mm in the places where mm goes. Her hands keep shelling and she is good at it and the bowl is filling.

And her sister says, Well what would you have done?

And there it is. She has no idea. Not the faintest notion what the question is about. She has been sitting eighteen inches from her only sister for the better part of an hour and she was not there for one minute of it.

She covers it. Anybody would. You know what, tell me the last bit again. And her sister does, happily, because she likes telling it.

But something has landed in her now and it will not lift. It is not guilt about the beans or about Ruth. It is a plain and frightening arithmetic: if she was not here for this hour, how many hours has it been.

Come sit on the step with me, sister. There is a line in a psalm that everybody has cross stitched on something, and I want you to hear which day it is talking about.

The day in that verse is a made thing

You have seen it on a mug. It goes on cards and it gets read out at the start of things.

This is the day which the LORD hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.Psalm 118:24

Read the middle of it. Which the LORD hath made. The day is a manufactured object. Somebody made it, deliberately, out of nothing, the way somebody makes a chair or a loaf. And then it was set down here, in front of you, on a porch, with beans in it.

Now that is not a small thing, because it puts today in a category people rarely put it in. Today is not the raw material you have to make something of. Today is already the finished article. It was made, and it was made by Him, and it was given.

You are standing inside something He made on purpose, and this particular afternoon was not an accident that happened to you. That is not a sentiment I stitched onto an old verse; Psalm 118:24 says plainly that the Lord made the day before it says anything about being glad in it, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a psalm sung on a road to a temple and lays it across two chairs on a porch with a pitcher going warm. The hour you missed was a made thing. So is this one.

Now the second half, and this is the one I want you to carry.

Notice the verse does not say this was the day. Present tense. It is a sentence built to be said in the middle of the thing, not afterward in an accounting. Which means the moment you say it, you are somewhere. You are not summarizing. You are locating.

You have a present tense available to you, and the psalm hands it over without asking what you did with yesterday. The written word puts it as this is the day, right now, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a present tense a real place a person can stand in rather than a grammatical observation. There is no audit at the front of that verse.

What being here actually is, and what it is not

Let me be careful here, because I know exactly what you are about to do with this, and it is what everybody does.

You are about to try harder. You are going to make a rule about listening to your sister and you will keep it for about four days. I have watched good women do that with beans in their laps for fifty years and it does not hold, and when it stops holding you will take it as more evidence against yourself.

Being present is not effort applied to a conversation. It is not concentration, and it certainly is not a technique. It is closer to what a person does when they come inside out of the cold: they stop being somewhere else.

And Scripture does not treat it as an achievement. It treats it as a gift with a location. Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me (Psalm 139:5). Behind and before. There is no hour of yours He is not already in, which means being present is not traveling somewhere. It is noticing where you already are.

You are already in a place He is already in, and being here is a matter of arriving rather than of achieving. Psalm 139:5 says He has beset you behind and before, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a felt fact on a porch board rather than a doctrine about omnipresence. He is not waiting at some better version of this afternoon.

And here is the last of it, because you have a mouth and it does more than say mm in the right places.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed a body ever put in the ground. Not the strength of your attention. Not how much of this hour you managed to catch. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way it works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.