The Saturday That Has Always Been Yours

She worked out, sitting in the car outside a garden center, that she could account for eleven years of Saturdays.

Not in a bad way. That is what made it strange. There was nothing shameful in the list. Her mother, most months. Her friend Nic, who she walks with. Her son's football when he was younger and now her daughter's swimming. The garden center itself, which she loves. Two weddings a year. Coffee with people she genuinely likes.

She is not a selfish woman. Anybody who knows her would say so first.

But she sat there with the engine off and she went through it properly, year by year, and what she found was that in eleven years she could not identify one Saturday afternoon that had gone to somebody who could not do anything for her.

Every single hour had been spent inside a system of return. Her mother loves her. Nic walks with her back. The people at the church do things for her and she does things for them. The whole eleven years is a closed circuit of good people trading good things, and it is not wrong, and it is not what she thought her life was going to be.

What she said, out loud, to the windscreen, was: "My faith has never cost me an afternoon."

And then she went in and bought compost, because that is what people do with a sentence like that.

The ones who cannot pay you back

Jesus is at a dinner and He says something about guest lists that is so socially outrageous that people usually spiritualize it immediately so as not to have to look at it.

But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind: and thou shalt be blessed; for they cannot recompense thee.Luke 14:13-14

Take that in the car park. You are free to spend an hour that returns you nothing, and the emptiness of the return is the qualifying feature. The word says they cannot recompense thee, and it is the Holy Spirit who put that clause in the gospel for a woman in a closed circuit.

For they cannot recompense thee.

That clause is not an afterthought. He gives it as the reason. Not despite the fact that they cannot pay you back. Because of it. The inability to return the favor is the qualifying feature of the guest list.

Which means He is describing a category of hour that most of us never spend, and He is describing it as a blessed one.

So take this in your car, and know it is not my rebuke, it is what is written: you are free to spend an hour that comes back to you empty, right now, without earning the right to. His word says call the ones who cannot recompense thee, and it is the Holy Spirit who put that sentence in the gospel so that a good woman in a closed circuit would eventually read it and see the shape of her own week.

And hear the other half of this before we go further, because I will not let it be missed. Nothing on your list is bad. Your mother is not a compromise. Nic is not a waste of a Saturday. Reciprocity is a good and God given thing and it is most of what holds a life together.

He is not asking for the eleven years back. He is asking for one hour.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who was met by God at a meeting he had not wanted to attend, and what came out of it was not a feeling but a timetable.

And most of that timetable went to people who could not do a single thing for him.

Prisons, over and over, for fifty years. Debtors' gaols. Pit villages where a man had nothing to give but his attention. He sat with people the night before they were hanged. He organized visiting, lending, feeding, and schooling, and the whole shape of it was directed at people outside the circuit of return.

The name that got attached to those people started as a joke about how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the place the warmth went was toward the people who could give nothing back.