One Hour on a Wednesday

The book is open at page eleven and it has been open at page eleven for four minutes.

The boy is seven. He has one shoe hooked around the leg of the chair and he is looking at a word he has looked at every Wednesday since the middle of September, and it is not a hard word. It has five letters in it. His finger is on it. He knows the first sound and he knows the last sound and there is a whole country in between that he cannot get across, and his ears have gone red, which is how she knows he is about to say he needs the bathroom.

It is twenty past two in a school library that smells of glue and radiators. There is a paper snowflake on the window left over from last winter. Two tables away another child is reading fluently and loudly to a volunteer who keeps saying lovely, lovely.

She does not say anything. She has learned not to fill it.

She puts her finger under the word beside his and waits, and the waiting goes on long enough to be uncomfortable, and then a bit longer than that, and then the boy makes a sound that is not the word but is the beginning of it, and she says, that is it, keep going, and he does. He gets it. He gets the whole thing, the country in the middle and all, and he sits back so hard the chair squeaks and looks at her with his mouth open and says: I did that one.

And they turn to page twelve.

Nothing else happens. She is there for fifty minutes. She reads with two more children, one of whom tells her at length about a hamster. At ten past three she signs out at the office and walks to her car past the parents starting to gather at the gate, and drives home, and puts the kettle on in a house where nobody needs anything from her at all.

Here is what she would have told you, that morning, if you had asked her what she was for now. She would have said: honestly, nothing much. The children are grown and they are fine and they call. The years when every hour of hers was spoken for are over, and she was not sorry to see them go, and she was not prepared for what came after either. She has a great deal of time and no idea what an ordinary hour of hers could possibly be worth to anybody.

She does not know that a boy went home tonight and told his mom he read page eleven.

You know that hour. Maybe you got out of something and everybody said now you can do anything you like, and the anything has stayed stubbornly blank, and underneath it sits a quieter and more embarrassing thought: that whatever gets given to other people to do, you have not been given one, and possibly you missed it.

I am not going to hand you a role this afternoon. There is nothing here that becomes a new obligation by the end of the page. But your freedom has a direction, and the direction is smaller and far more ordinary than the word purpose usually suggests.

The comfort has your fingerprints on it

Paul opens his second letter to Corinth with a sentence that is usually read as a comfort and is actually a mechanism.

Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.2 Corinthians 1:4

Read the last clause slowly, because everything is in it. Not: so that we may comfort others with wise advice. Not: so that we may become qualified. By the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted. The same comfort. The thing you were given is the thing you hand over, and it does not become something else in transit.

That changes what the qualification is. You have been assuming the requirement is expertise, or energy, or being the sort of person who is good with people. Read the mechanism again: 2 Corinthians 1 makes the entry requirement having been comforted by God, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries the thing from one person to another rather than any technique of yours. You have already met the only condition there is.

And notice that Paul is not describing a program. There is no schedule in that verse, no roster, no minimum. He is describing what comfort does when it is in somebody: it moves. It is not the kind of thing that stays put and improves with keeping.

What an ordinary hour is worth to one person

Now the arithmetic that has been going on quietly in the back of your head, which needs answering rather than encouraging.

It says: an hour of mine is not worth much. It is not skilled. Anybody could do it. And if the thing I could offer is that ordinary, then either it is not really needed or somebody more capable will do it better, and either way there is no shape here for me.

Let me answer it from outside. The boy did not need a reading specialist on Wednesday. He needed one adult who would not fill his silence for him. That is the whole job description, and it is not a small thing pretending to be big; it is genuinely small, and it was genuinely the thing. Ephesians 2 says we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works that God prepared in advance for us to walk in, and the Spirit who inspired that line is already walking you into yours: you have works with your name on them that were prepared before you had any idea what to do with a Wednesday.

Look at the word walk in that. Not achieve. Not build. Walk in, which is what you do with a path that is already there, at the pace of a person going somewhere ordinary.

And here is the thing I most want you to hear, because the category this message sits in can turn cruel very fast in the wrong hands. If you cannot name yours yet, nothing has been wasted. Not one month of it. The freedom is not a grant with conditions attached, and there is no clock running behind it, and a person who has been out for two years and still cannot say what it is for has not failed a test. Galatians 6 talks about doing good as we have opportunity, and opportunity is a door that opens rather than a duty that arrives, and His Spirit is better at opening doors than you are at finding them.

One plain paragraph, late but not last. If the blankness has stopped being a question about your week and has become a feeling that there is no point in you at all, please say that out loud today to one human being, and if you are in any danger reach the crisis line where you live and stay with it until somebody is beside you. That is not a failure of purpose. It is a free person doing exactly the right thing.