An Unspoken-For Monday

Rosalie is at the gate at ten past six because that is when she has been at the gate for thirty-one years, and there is nowhere on earth she is supposed to be.

Her boots are on. She put them on the way she always puts them on, sitting on the bench in the mud room with her hand on the door frame, and it was not until she was standing in the yard in the half dark that the question arrived and did not have an answer: for what.

The papers were signed in September. The name came off the sign at the end of the lane on a Tuesday, and a young man from two counties over now opens the doors at seven and does it perfectly well, and Rosalie has driven past twice and not slowed down. Nobody made her sell. It was the right thing done at the right time by a woman who could still read a ledger better than anybody in the county, and she would do it again this morning.

And here she is at the gate at ten past six with the fog sitting in the low field, holding a mug she brought out by habit, and the whole week in front of her has nothing in it. Not one thing. No delivery Wednesday. No count on Friday. No one who will telephone at half past eight if she is not where she said.

There is a particular loneliness in that which nobody warns a person about, and it is not the loneliness of missing people. It is the loneliness of not being expected.

She would tell you, if she trusted you, that the worst of it is how much she misses the shape. Not the work. She is honest enough to know she does not miss the work. She misses knowing what Tuesday was. Thirty-one years of Tuesdays that arrived already made, with their edges on, and all she had to do was walk into the middle of one and it would carry her to Wednesday. Now the days come at her blank and she has to make them out of nothing before breakfast, and she is fifty-nine years old and standing in her own yard feeling like she has been dropped into somebody else's life without the instructions.

And under that, quieter, there is a small mean voice doing arithmetic. It has been eleven weeks. What have you got to show for eleven weeks.

You are the one at the gate. I do not know what came off your sign or when, and I am not going to guess at it, because that is yours. But I know a woman standing in her boots in the fog with nowhere to be, and I know the arithmetic that starts up on the eleventh week. So I have come down the lane and I am leaning on the gate beside you, and the first thing I want to say is the thing nobody has said yet: missing the old shape is not a betrayal of anything.

He Rained Bread on People Who Missed Egypt

Let me start where nobody starts, because it is the part that has been held against you by you.

There is a chapter where a whole nation, freshly and legally free, walked out into open country and started saying out loud that they wished they were back where they came from. It was not noble. It was not even fair to the God who had just opened the sea for them. They said it because the old place had one thing the new one did not, which was a known quantity of food at a known hour.

And read what God did with that.

Then said the LORD unto Moses, Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a certain rate every day, that I may prove them, whether they will walk in my law, or no.Exodus 16:4

He fed them. That is the sentence to sit with this morning. There is no lecture in it, no accounting of how ungrateful the complaint was, no requirement that they get their attitude right before breakfast. They were homesick for a place that had used them, and He rained bread on them. You have a God who feeds a woman while she is still missing the old timetable, and He is not standing off waiting for you to stop. Hear where that comes from: it is written in Exodus 16, and the Holy Spirit is the one bringing an old wilderness morning out to a gate in your own county.

Now look at the shape of what He gave them, because it is precisely the shape you are standing in. A certain rate every day. Not a week's worth. Not a plan. Not a schedule they could put on a wall and lean on. Enough for the day, every day, gathered in the morning, and it did not keep if they tried to hold it over. He took a nation that wanted a timetable and He gave them a rhythm instead, and the rhythm required them to come out and look every single morning.

That is not a downgrade. That is a closer walk, and it is harder, and He knew it. You are being fed daily rather than scheduled weekly, and that is not God being vague with you, it is God being near you. That is not my reading to impose. Exodus 16 says a certain rate every day in plain writing, and the same Spirit who put it there is at the gate in the fog.

A Week With No Shape Is Not a Waste

Now the second thing, and it is the one that goes after the arithmetic.

Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.Isaiah 43:19

Read where He puts the road. In the wilderness. Not in the settled country, not on ground somebody has already surveyed. A wilderness is not a punishment in that verse and it is not a holding pen. It is the exact place a way gets made, which means the blankness of your week is the raw material and not the evidence against you.

And notice who is doing the making. Not the woman standing in it. You were put in open country by a God who makes ways in open country, and the road is His to lay and not yours to have finished by the eleventh week. That verdict is not mine to give. It is God's, recorded in Isaiah 43, and His Spirit is the one who turns a promise on a page into something you can stand in the fog on.

I will say the hard half too, because I would rather be honest than encouraging. Springing forth is not fast. The verse says now it shall spring forth, and a thing that springs forth has been under the ground a while doing nothing anybody could photograph. Eleven weeks of days with nothing in them may be exactly what a new thing looks like from above the soil. Psalm 37:23 says the steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD, and ordered steps do not always feel ordered from inside the boot. You are not behind, because there is no schedule you are behind on, and the only calendar that governs a free woman is the one her Father is keeping. His word does not carry a productivity clause for people over fifty, and His Spirit is not keeping a second set of books on how your eleven weeks have gone.

One thing plainly, late and quiet, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the empty days have gone dark in a way that is being handled alone, tell one human being today, out loud, and if there is any danger at all, reach the crisis line where you live and let a real voice stay with you. Reaching for help is one of the ordinary things a free woman does with a Monday.