The Tuesday With Nothing In It

The living room at seven ten on a Tuesday, and the phone has not made a sound since four thirty.

That is the detail she notices first, and she notices it the way you notice a clock that has stopped. For fourteen years the phone did the seven o'clock thing. Somebody could not do Sunday. Somebody had swapped and had not told the other person they had swapped. The hall key. The urn. Whether the youth group could have the small room if the men's breakfast had the big one. She used to answer it standing up with a pen already in her hand.

She ran everything. Not in a grand way; nobody ever announced it. She simply had the folder, and then two folders, and then the big spreadsheet with the color coding that only she could read, and fourteen years went by like that. Sundays, midweek, the Christmas thing, the summer thing, the roster for the roster, and her handwriting on the back of every envelope in that building.

And now it has all gone to a team of three younger people who are, and she means this, better at it than she ever was. She handed it over herself. She said the words out loud at a meeting and everybody clapped and somebody gave her flowers. It was right. She still thinks it was right at seven ten on a Tuesday.

The living room is very tidy. There is a program on she does not mind. There is a whole evening in front of her, and after that a whole Wednesday, and beyond that the alarming stretch of a week with four clear nights in it.

She keeps picking up her phone and putting it down.

Because underneath the tidy room there is a sentence going round, and it has been going around since about five thirty, and it is this: nobody needs anything from me tonight. She would not say it to a living soul. It sounds ungrateful and she is not ungrateful. But it does not feel like rest. It feels like being stood down. It feels like the exact moment the light goes off in a building you used to have the keys for.

And here is the part she is most ashamed of. Some nights she misses the phone. She misses being the one who fixes it. She would not go back, and she misses it, and she does not know what kind of woman holds both of those at once.

You know that Tuesday.

Maybe yours came from a job, or a house full of people who all live somewhere else now, or a season of carrying somebody that has ended the way those seasons end. However you got here, you are sitting in an evening with nothing in it and calling it uselessness, and I have come to sit down on the other end of the sofa and tell you what Jesus called it.

He said it to the busiest people He had

Look at who He said it to, and look at when, because the timing is the whole sermon.

The apostles have just come back. They have been out two by two, and Mark says they gathered around Jesus and told Him everything, all they had done and all they had taught, which is exactly what a person does when they come back off two weeks of it and cannot stop talking. Crowds are still arriving. There is so much coming and going that nobody has managed to sit down and eat. This is the height of it. This is the busy, useful, needed part.

And the very next thing out of His mouth is not well done, now more.

And he said to them, "Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while." For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat.Mark 6:31

Come away. By yourselves. Rest a while.

Sit with how strange that is. There were people at the door. There was a legitimate, urgent, entirely real need pressing in on all sides, and He looked at the ones carrying it and took them out of it. He did not wait for a quiet season. He made one. And the emptiness they walked into was not a gap in the work; it was the work of God on them rather than through them, and He was the one who signed it off.

This is not a consolation I have made up for a quiet Tuesday. It is written in Mark 6, and the same Spirit who moved Him to say it is the one carrying it across two thousand years into your living room: you are in a room He cleared, and being cleared by Him is not the same as being set aside.

And notice that He does not explain Himself to them. He does not first prove they had earned a break, or check whether they were tired enough to qualify. Rest in that sentence is not a wage. It is a Shepherd's decision about His own people. His word calls it rest and never once calls it waste, and His Spirit is not filing it differently behind Him: it is already settled that the empty evening is care, and it was settled by the One who invented the evening.

Useful and loved are two different words

Now let me name the sentence going round the tidy room, because it will keep going around until somebody says it out loud.

It is not really I have nothing to do. It is I have nothing to show. For fourteen years there was a running total: the phone rang, therefore somebody needed you, therefore you were worth the space you took up in that building. It was daily, it was measurable, and it was warm. And now the total has stopped counting and the fear underneath is not boredom at all. It is the suspicion that being needed was the whole of your standing, and that with nobody waiting on you tonight there is nothing left to look at.

Hear this plainly. God never once measured you that way, and the proof is that He calls His people away from the very work that made them useful and calls it good. The word says come away, and the Holy Spirit is the one who reads a cleared evening as care rather than as a verdict: you have a worth that was never attached to the phone ringing, and it did not move an inch on the night the ringing stopped.

And I am not going to tell you off for missing it. Missing a full evening is not a betrayal of a free one. You are allowed to want the old shape back and to know you would not go back; two things can be true in the same chest, and a woman who feels both is not confused, she is accurate. The old life was predictable and the new one is open, and open takes more courage than full ever did. Nobody warns you about that.

And plainly, before we go on, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the quiet in the evenings has turned into something heavier than quiet, and it has gone somewhere dark, tell one human being today, 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 a person is not the opposite of trusting God. It is one of the ordinary brave things a free woman does with an open week.