The List For Tomorrow Is Empty

Nine o'clock, and he opens the app sitting on the end of the bed, because the signal is better by the window.

Pull down to refresh. The circle spins. Tomorrow: nothing.

He was in yesterday. He was on aisle fourteen, he hit his rate, and he stayed on at the end to help clear a pallet that nobody had asked him to clear.

There is no message. There is no reason given, because giving a reason is not a thing the app does. There is a number for the agency that goes to a menu, and the menu has no option for this.

He pulls down to refresh again. The circle spins. Tomorrow: nothing.

His wife is asleep in the other room because she is up at five. He does not wake her to tell her, because there is nothing to tell her that she is not already expecting.

He puts the phone face down and lies back and says it quietly, out loud, the way he has said it for two years. Lord, please. Just something.

Then he waits in the dark the way he has waited before, and the room is exactly as quiet afterwards as it was before he said it.

That is the room you are lying in as well. So I am not going to explain it to you.

Verse two of a song they all sang together

Let me show you something in the Bible that nearly everybody reads straight past.

Psalm 22 is a famous psalm. It is the one Jesus quoted from the cross (Matthew 27:46), and most of us know the first line by heart. Almost nobody knows the second one, and the second one is where a man on a zero hours contract has been living for two years.

O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.Psalm 22:2

In the Hebrew, that last phrase is lo dumiyah li: there is no silence for me. He means it as a complaint, and the complaint is precise. I do not stop. Nothing comes back.

Now look at the line above the psalm, the superscription, which is part of the Hebrew text and not a note added by a modern editor: To the chief Musician upon Aijeleth Shahar. The hind of the dawn. That is the name of a tune. This was handed to the choir director with a melody attached, so that a congregation could learn it and sing it together, out loud, in company.

Sit still with that for a moment. The sentence I call and You do not answer was set to music and taught to a whole nation.

So hear this on the end of that bed. You are not out of bounds, and the sentence you have never dared say is verse two of a psalm. Psalm 22:2 stands in the written word with a tune name written over the top of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who kept it there and never once tidied it up, which tells you exactly what He thinks of a person saying the true thing about an unanswered prayer.

I am not going to explain the quiet

Here is where most articles turn, and this one will not.

I do not know why it has been quiet. I am not going to tell you it is a season with a purpose in it, or a test, or a delay with a reason waiting at the end, or that God is working something in you that needed the silence to happen first. I do not know any of that. Nobody writing to a stranger knows it, and the people who say it are usually guessing out loud in front of somebody in pain.

And I am not going to tell you that there is a key you missed. There is no arrangement anywhere in Scripture where a person opens God with the right move, and if you have been going back through two years looking for the thing you did wrong, you have been searching a room with nothing in it. The Holy Spirit is not standing behind a door holding an answer until you find the handle, and Romans 8:1 has already settled the question of whether you are under investigation.

You are not under investigation. That is not my kindness to you, it is a legal fact in the written word, and the Spirit of God bears witness to it inside you whether the room stays quiet tonight or not.

What I can tell you instead

Two things, and both of them are written down, which is the only reason I am allowed to say them.

The first is that He is here. Not because the room feels different, and not because anything came back. Paul told a crowd of strangers in Athens that God is not far from every one of us (Acts 17:27), and he said it to people who had never once heard from Him.

The second is that His nearness was never a payment you failed to make. Romans 5:8 says that God commended His love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us, which puts the whole transaction before anything you did or did not do.

So this is yours in the quiet tonight. You are near to Him and He is near to you, and it was decided long before this stretch started. The written word says so in both directions, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a present fact in a dark room rather than a nice sentence about somebody else.