The First Sunday You Had to Decide

Eight fifteen on a Sunday, and she has been standing at the window for eleven minutes with a cup she has not drunk from.

Out there a man is putting a ladder on a roof rack. Two women go past at a jog, talking. Somebody's dog has got into the flower bed at the corner and there is a good deal of shouting about it, cheerful shouting, the Sunday kind. Behind her the house is quiet and warm and entirely hers, and the whole day is lying in front of her with nothing on it whatsoever.

Nothing. Not one thing. No hour that belongs to anybody. No place she has to be at ten, or at half past two, or at six for a meal that has to be on the table because that is when it goes on the table. She could go to the coast. She could go back to bed. She could paint the small bedroom. She could sit in this exact spot until the light moves across the carpet and be doing nothing wrong.

And she is standing at the window with a cold cup because she has no idea how to begin, and she cannot say that out loud to anybody, because how do you say it. Everybody wants a day like this. People work for years for a day like this.

There was always a timetable. That is all I am going to say about where it came from, because that part is hers and it is not the subject this morning. There was a shape to the day and the shape was handed to her, and the shape was not kind, and she would not go back to it, and she has been very clear about that with herself.

And still there is the thing she has not said. She misses knowing. Not the life. The knowing. She misses opening her eyes and being told, before her feet were on the floor, what the day was for.

You are standing at that window.

Perhaps your Sunday is a Tuesday. Perhaps it is a room you do not have to leave by a certain hour any more, or a phone that no longer goes off at ten past ten, or a week nobody else has arranged. And you have discovered a thing that is embarrassing to admit in a world that talks about freedom the way it talks about a holiday: the open day is heavier than the full one was. There is more to carry in it, not less. And the weight has a strange shape, because it is not sorrow and it is not fear exactly. It is the weight of the choosing.

Nobody is going to tell you off for that this morning, and nobody is going to call it ingratitude. Missing the shape of a thing is not the same as wanting the thing back, and a person can be entirely free and still stand at a window for eleven minutes with a cup going cold in their hands.

What the timetable was doing

Let me name honestly what has been lost, because a comfort that will not admit the loss is worth nothing.

A timetable, even a hard one, does two things at once. It takes your hours, which is the cost, and it carries the weight of deciding, which is the strange, quiet benefit nobody warns you about. Whoever set the day also owned the day. If the morning was wasted it was not wasted by you. If it went badly, the badness had somebody else's name on it. There is a kind of rest in that, and it is a counterfeit rest, and it is a real relief, and both of those things are true at once.

So when the timetable goes, the hours come back and the weight comes back with them, and nobody hands you anything to carry it in. That is not weakness at the window. That is arithmetic.

For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.Galatians 5:13

Hear the first four words before anything else in that verse, because everybody rushes past them to the instruction. Called. Not released, not discharged, not simply let out of somewhere with the door swinging. Called. A call has a voice inside it, and a voice has a Person behind it, and that means the open morning is not a room anybody was left in. It is a room somebody was called into by One who is already standing in it, and His Spirit is the one who makes that old word land rather than merely read.

I am not saying that over you out of my own kindness. It is written in Galatians 5:13, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the word called off an old page and puts it into a quiet house at eight fifteen. You were called into this morning, and the calling came before the emptiness did.

Notice, too, what the verse does with the one limit it gives. It does not hand her a schedule. It does not say: use your freedom by getting up at seven and making a plan and improving yourself. The one boundary Paul draws is love, and love is enormously wide, and inside it the day is genuinely, actually hers.

This is not a small thing and I do not want to rush past it. Every rule she ever had was narrow, and the first real instruction she meets on the other side is wide enough to hold a hundred different Sundays. You have room, and the room is written down, and the same Spirit who inspired that sentence is not standing behind it with a narrower version.

Called, which means somebody is calling

The fear underneath the window is not usually about the day at all. It is about the chooser.

It sounds like this: I do not know how to decide, I only ever knew how to comply, and if the day goes wrong now there is nobody to blame but me. That is a real fear and it deserves a real answer, and the answer is not that a person must become decisive. Psalm 32 has God counseling rather than instructing from a distance, and His Spirit is the one doing the counseling in a room where nobody else is speaking: you were never expected to do the choosing on your own.

I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you.Psalm 32:8

Counsel with His eye on her. Not a list left on the counter and a locked door. Not a supervisor with a clipboard, either. The picture in that verse is somebody in the room with you, watching, and interested, and glad, the way you might teach a friend to drive by sitting beside them and letting them steer.

And James, writing to people who were making hard calls with no clear map, says: if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him (James 1:5). Read the last three words of that phrase twice. Without reproach. He does not sigh. He is not disappointed that you had to ask on a Sunday about a Sunday. He gives generously, and generously is not a small pinch of guidance handed over with a look.

That is God's own way of describing Himself, recorded in James 1, and the Spirit who moved that letter is the one making it true in a living room this morning. This is yours: counsel without a sigh in it, on the smallest question you have.

One plain paragraph, and then we go on. If the open day has stopped being heavy and started being frightening, if standing at the window has turned into not much wanting the day at all, then tell one human being today, in ordinary words. If there is any danger at all, reach the crisis line where you live; in the United States that is a call or a text to 988. Letting somebody sit in the room with you is one of the ordinary, sane things a free person does with a hard morning.