He Cannot Come Until Tuesday

Tuesday.

He was perfectly nice about it. He looked at something on his screen and said the earliest is Tuesday, and there was nothing in his voice that was doing anything other than telling you the truth about his week.

And you said that is fine, because what else is there to say, and you wrote it down, and then you hung up and stood in the hall for a moment.

Four days.

And here is what has happened since, and it happened without any decision being made about it.

The four days have stopped being days. They have become a corridor. A stretch of time with nothing in it except the fact that it is not Tuesday yet, and every hour of it is being spent in a kind of suspended state, as though real life resumes when the van pulls up.

Friday was not a Friday. It was one of the four days. Saturday will be the same and so will Sunday, and by Monday night the whole thing will have a pressure to it that has very little to do with the machine.

That is the thing I want to take apart, because four days is a real length of time and it belongs to you, and at the moment it has been handed over to an appointment.

You are living in four ordinary days and not in a waiting room, and a gap before an appointment has never once been time you were required to hold your breath through.

Quietly wait

There is a line in Lamentations, which is a book written by somebody in the middle of something genuinely terrible, and it says a strange thing about waiting.

It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the LORD. (Lamentations 3:26, King James Version)

It is good. That is the part to sit with. Not it is bearable, not it is unavoidable, not it builds character if you get through it correctly. It is good.

And the two words together: hope, and quietly wait. Both at once. The hoping is active and the waiting is quiet, and the verse sees no contradiction between them at all.

You are able to hope for Tuesday and be quiet on Saturday at the same time, and a stretch of waiting has never once been required to be a stretch of straining. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a hallway with somebody who has just written a day down, and Lamentations 3:26 puts hoping and quiet waiting in the same clause without any tension between them.

Now notice who wrote it and where from.

This is not a calm man with a comfortable life recommending patience to people in trouble. The book is called Lamentations for a reason. The man writing that sentence is sitting in the ruins of a city, and from there he says that quiet waiting is good.

That matters because it means the verse is not naive. It is not a line about small inconveniences written by somebody who has only had small inconveniences.

You are being handed a sentence that was written from inside something much heavier than this, and a word about waiting that came out of ruins has never once been a word that underestimated what waiting costs. The written word puts that line in the mouth of a man surrounded by the worst of it, and the Spirit of God is the one who brings an old sentence into a hallway on a Friday morning.

And the word quietly is doing real work in that verse.

Quietly does not mean silently and it does not mean without feeling. It means without thrashing. Without the constant taking of the thing out and turning it over and putting it back. That is what the four days are currently full of, and that is the part the verse is speaking to.

You have permission to stop turning it over between now and Tuesday, and a question you have already asked and answered has never once needed asking again on Saturday afternoon. The Holy Spirit is the one who quiets a house that has been holding its breath since Thursday, and Lamentations 3:26 calls the quiet part good rather than merely permitted.

The four days are yours

Something practical, and it is small and it works.

Get the calendar out, whichever one your house actually uses, and look at the four days as four separate boxes rather than one block.

Friday. Saturday. Sunday. Monday. Four boxes, each one a whole day long, each one containing an entire day's worth of hours that have nothing to do with an appointment.

Now write one ordinary thing in each box. Not a task about the machine. Not a preparation for Tuesday. One ordinary thing that would have been in that day if nothing had broken at all.

You are handing four days back to themselves tonight, and a day with one ordinary thing written in it has never once been a day spent waiting. The written word calls the quiet waiting good and does not describe it as a suspension of living, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in an ordinary Saturday as much as He is in a Tuesday.

Somebody's birthday call. The walk. The thing on Sunday afternoon that always happens. Whatever the four days already contained before the phone call rearranged them.

And here is why this is not a trick to make yourself feel better, which is what it might sound like.

The four days are going to pass at exactly the same speed either way. Nothing about holding your breath through them makes Tuesday arrive sooner, and nothing about living in them makes it arrive later. The only variable in the whole arrangement is whether you get to keep the four days or whether the appointment gets to have them.

You are not being asked to pretend the machine is working, and living inside four days has never once been the same thing as ignoring what happens on the fifth. The Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman put a sheet on a line on a Saturday without checking the date, and Lamentations 3:26 holds the hoping and the waiting together rather than asking anybody to drop one.

Then, on Monday night, get the thing ready that needs to be ready. Move what needs moving. That is a twenty minute job and it belongs in Monday, not in Friday.