Thursday Belongs to Him Too

There is frost on the roof of the bus shelter and five people underneath it, none of them talking. A woman with a canvas bag on her knees. Two lads with their hoods up. A man in a waxed jacket holding a flask he has not opened, because opening it means the bus is late enough to need it and he is not ready to admit that yet.

Twenty minutes ago that man was walking up the ridge road with the feed buckets banging against his leg, the way he has walked it since he was nineteen. And the light came over the top of the hill and hit the frost on the wire fence, and for about forty seconds he was awake. Properly awake. Not thinking about anything. Just standing in a lane with his mouth slightly open, and something going through his chest that he has no vocabulary for, and the strange fact that his eyes had gone wet over a fence.

He does not tell the people at the bus stop. He would not know how. What he does instead, standing there with the unopened flask, is start the countdown. Because he knows himself. Tomorrow will be busy. By Thursday he will be back to running the day off the top of his head, and this morning will have shrunk down to a nice thing that happened, filed with the other nice things, and he will feel more foolish for having hoped than he ever felt for being numb.

You are doing the same arithmetic right now. Something got through this week, and instead of receiving it, you started bracing for the wearing off. Not because you are cynical. Because you have been here before and you have watched it fade before, and it is easier to expect the fading than to be surprised by it again.

The countdown, and who started it

Let me say the low thing plainly before anything good gets said, because a message that skips it is no use to a man at a bus stop. The hardest part of being woken is not the sleep. It is the fear that the waking was a fluke, and that in three days it will be your job to hold on to something you never generated in the first place. Nobody wants to hope twice about the same thing. It is the second hope that costs.

And notice who is being handed the workload in that arithmetic. In one silent move at a bus shelter, the whole business quietly became his to maintain. He never decided that. Nobody preached it at him. It simply arrived, the way this kind of thing does, wearing the clothes of realism.

So let us put a different sentence in the road. It is one line from Isaiah, and it is one of those verses that changes what a person expects of tomorrow.

The Lord GOD has given me the tongue of those who are taught, that I may know how to sustain with a word him who is weary. Morning by morning he awakens; he awakens my ear to hear as those who are taught.Isaiah 50:4

Morning by morning He awakens. Not once, at a camp, at nineteen. Not on the good weeks. Morning by morning, which is the plainest way Hebrew has of saying every single one of them, and He is the subject of the sentence in every one. You are woken by God and not by your own attention, and that is not a comfort I invented, it is what is written, and His Spirit is the one who does the waking work while a man is still reaching for his boots.

Whose job the morning is

Think about what actually happened on the ridge road. He did not schedule it. He was not praying. He was carrying two buckets and thinking about a gate that needs rehanging. The light came, and God did something, and forty seconds later a man who had not cried in eleven years had wet eyes over a wire fence.

Now, nobody on earth can make that happen twice by trying harder at it. And here is the good news buried in that, which most tired believers never turn over and look at: he could not have caused it, so he cannot have lost it either. You have been given something you did not manufacture, which means the keeping of it was never handed to you. Scripture says the mercies of God are new every morning because His faithfulness is great, not because ours is. His Spirit does not need reminding what day of the week it is.

Which brings us to Thursday, since Thursday is what he is really frightened of. Thursday, in his head, is the day the numbness comes back and proves the whole thing was nothing. But look at what Isaiah actually says. If God wakens morning by morning, then Thursday is not the day the waking runs out. Thursday is another morning, with the same God at the front of the sentence. You are not required to carry Tuesday's waking all the way into Thursday. You are required to be there on Thursday morning, which you will be, because you have to get up anyway.

And when a flat day comes, and one will, that is not a relapse and it is not a verdict on anything. A flat Thursday is a Thursday. Some mornings God speaks and you know it, and some mornings He is doing something quietly that you will only recognize months later, and both of those are mornings He is present for. The Holy Spirit is not less at work on the days you do not feel Him working, and the written word never once made your perception the measure of His presence.

One plain thing, said once and then left with you. Flatness has a hundred causes and some of them are medical, and no article on the internet knows which one is yours. But if the numbness has turned into a weight telling you that people would manage better without you here, then today is the day to say it to an actual human being: your doctor, your pastor, a friend who will come and sit down in your kitchen. In the United States, call or text 988. Elsewhere, your local emergency number or crisis line. A prayer and a phone call have never once been rivals, and I would tell my own brother exactly the same thing.