The Tuesday You Did Not Notice

She has a system for it, which is the part she would never say out loud.

Every few weeks, usually early in the month, she checks. She sits in the good chair with her coffee, puts both feet flat on the floor, and waits about four minutes to see whether anything happens. Not a vision. She is not a woman who expects visions. She is checking for a temperature.

Because in the spring of the year she turned twenty six, in a rented room with a terrible carpet and eleven other people in it, something came over her that she has never once managed to describe to another human being. She has tried. It comes out sounding like weather. And she has been checking for it ever since, in that chair, with those four minutes, the way you press the back of your hand to a radiator to find out if the heating is on.

She is forty one now. That is fifteen years of checking.

And here is what she said to her sister in the car last week, in the voice people use when they have decided a thing is true and would like to stop discussing it. She said, "I think I got the whole amount at the start."

Then the lights changed and neither of them said anything for a mile.

That is the sentence this is about. Not the doubt underneath it, which is ordinary and survivable. The sentence itself. Because if she got the whole amount at the start, then every unremarkable Tuesday since has been a slow withdrawal from a fixed account, and there is nothing to do with a Tuesday like that except get through it.

He changed the volume, not the address

There is a man on a mountain in 1 Kings who has just seen God do something enormous in public, and who is now hiding in a cave and asking to die. God tells him to come out and stand there, and then puts on a display: a wind that breaks rocks, an earthquake, a fire. The text does something strange with all three. It says God was not in them.

And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.1 Kings 19:12

Hear that over yourself before we go one line further. You are not on rations. The word says the Lord was in the still small voice and not in the noise, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been speaking at that volume in every week you filed as empty.

The man had been given the loud one already. He was not given it twice. What he was given the second time was so quiet that the text has to tell you it happened, and he only knew to respond because he was standing outside the cave where he had been told to stand.

Hear this while you are sitting there, because it is yours and it is not my opinion. You are not on a reduced allowance. The nearness you are looking for is not being rationed to you and it was never a sum with a beginning and an end, because Scripture says He is the same yesterday and today and forever, and it is the Holy Spirit and not your memory who carries that into a Tuesday. What changed was the volume. The address did not change.

There was a man in the seventeen hundreds who went, without any enthusiasm at all, to a meeting on a street called Aldersgate. He wrote afterward that his heart was strangely warmed. It is one of the most quoted sentences in English religion, and almost nobody quotes what he did next, which was not to go looking for another warm evening.

He built a timetable.

Small groups meeting at a set hour. Plain questions asked out loud to a handful of people who knew him. And then a very great deal of time in prisons and in mines, which is where the warm heart actually went. The word that got fastened to those people was coined as an insult about how methodical they were. They kept it, because it happened to be accurate.

That is the whole invention and it is available to you this evening. A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and he held both by refusing to spend the rest of his life on the stairs at Aldersgate waiting for the temperature to come back.

You are not required to reproduce it. Take that one slowly, because it is the thing keeping you in the chair for four minutes at a time. God has not published a schedule that says the twenty six year old version of you was doing something right that the forty one year old version has stopped doing. That is not written anywhere. His word says He will never leave you nor forsake you, and His Spirit is the one holding you to that whether or not the room ever gets warm again.

Here is the part to be careful about, because it is where this goes wrong quickly. None of this means the first night was fake, or immature, or a phase you have outgrown. It was real. It did what it was for. He met you, and He knew exactly what a twenty six year old with a bad carpet needed, and He gave it. He is simply not obliged to say the same sentence twice to somebody who already heard it.