The last dryer goes off at ten past four, and the room goes quiet in a way it never used to.
She sweeps anyway. Two heads today, a cut and a color, and the floor under chair three hardly needs doing, but sweeping is what you do at the end, and she is not ready for the end to have arrived at ten past four.
The book is open on the shelf under the mirror. Next week is mostly white. She has stopped turning that page while anybody is standing near her.
Two chairs down, Rhiannon is still going, and has been since half eight. There is a waiting list on her phone and a photograph of somewhere warm pinned to the board behind her. Rhiannon is kind. She lends out the good scissors without being asked. She has never once done a single thing to deserve being resented by anyone.
The chair rent goes out on Friday whether a person sits in it or not. That was a fair arrangement when the book was full, and it is still the same arrangement now.
So she looks up while she sweeps, and there is her own face in the mirror, and she asks it. Not out loud. She has never once said it out loud. Why her and not me.
She says it to the glass, the way she has said it to the glass every Thursday since spring, and the glass does what glass does.
You have a mirror too. Perhaps it is a windscreen, or a ceiling at two in the morning. Let us take that question off the glass, gently, and put it somewhere it can actually go.
The question is already in the Bible
I want to begin by showing you where your question lives, because I do not think anybody ever has.
Righteous art thou, O Lord, when I plead with thee: yet let me talk with thee of thy judgments: Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper?Jeremiah 12:1
Read what that man does in one breath. He says God is righteous. He says he would like a word about it. Then he asks the question you have been asking a pane of glass since spring, and he asks it straight into God's face, and God does not strike him, does not scold him, and does not take the work off him.
You are allowed to ask that. Not allowed as in tolerated, allowed as in it was put in the book for you, kept in the written word by the Holy Spirit who saw to it that Jeremiah's complaint survived every copyist and every century, so that you would find it on a Thursday and know you were never the first.
Notice what is not there, either. No answer arrives in that chapter. God speaks back to him and He does not explain the prospering, and Jeremiah goes on being His prophet with the question still open. So if you have been waiting to feel differently before you are permitted to speak, that waiting was never asked of you by anyone.
What she has does not come out of your share
Here is the arithmetic your head has been running, and I want it said plainly so it stops being carried in the dark. If He is being that good to her, and He is not being that good to me, then something has been decided about me.
That is the real weight of it. It was never really about the bookings.
Peter did this on a beach, and it is one of the tenderest scenes in the Gospels for exactly this reason. He has only just been restored, and he turns, and he sees John, and the question is out of him instantly. Lord, what about him. Jesus does not tell him off for looking. He does not explain John's road either. He hands Peter his own name and his own road back and says follow thou me (John 21:22).
What He is giving Rhiannon has not been lifted out of anything that belonged to you. You are not standing behind her in a line, because there is no line, and the God who is good to her is the same God who is good to you. His goodness was never a fixed quantity divided among applicants, and His Spirit is not rationed, and neither is His attention. Scripture says He gives to all liberally and does not reproach (James 1:5), and the word liberally is doing real work in that sentence.
I am not telling you the unfairness is imaginary. I will not explain it away and I would not insult you by trying. I am telling you that the conclusion your head reached about you, on the way past that unfairness, is the part that is not true.
A question and a case are not the same thing
Something happens to a question that is never said out loud. It does not stay a question. It thickens.
You ask it at the mirror in spring and it is a question. You ask it again in June and there is a little evidence attached to it now. By the autumn there is a file, and you never built it on purpose, and nobody handed it to you, and yet there it sits with her holiday photograph in it and your white week in it. Then comes the morning you notice you are not asking anything any more. A verdict about God has quietly been reached, and it was never once tested by being spoken to Him.
That is not rebellion. That is what silence does to a question, and it happens to faithful people in quiet rooms all the time. Scripture calls Him the God who searches the heart and already knows exactly what is in it (Jeremiah 17:10), and the Holy Spirit was never once surprised by yours.
You are not in trouble for the file, and you have not been caught out by anyone. Nothing in it is news to Him, and nobody has been standing over you with the written word in one hand noting down how long you took to speak. His Spirit has been waiting for the sentence, not marking the delay.
Here is the small mercy hidden in it. A question that gets spoken stays a question. It is only the unspoken one that gets promoted.
The whole of it is the address. Not the wording, not the tone, not whether generosity arrived first. Only where the question goes.
You have standing to walk straight in with it. That standing is not earned on a good week and lost on a white one, and it is not issued on the strength of what you have. It is yours in Christ, bought and settled, which is why Scripture can tell an ordinary person to come boldly unto the throne of grace (Hebrews 4:16), and boldly is not a word anyone uses about approaching a stranger.
And when the question comes out badly, which it may, the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it up. He helps our infirmities, and He makes intercession out of groanings that never found their words (Romans 8:26). So the asking has never depended on your asking well.
You are safe to ask. Not because the question is polite, and not because you have arrived at the right feeling about Rhiannon, but because the One you are speaking to is your Father, and He has never once counted an honest question against a child of His.
Declare this over yourself
Say these quietly, wherever you are standing. The right to speak like this is yours in Christ, and it is not issued on the strength of what you have this week. Scripture is the ground under every word of it, and the Holy Spirit is what makes it living rather than merely brave. What God does about the bookings is His, however He answers, and nothing on this page pretends to know.
- White week in my book, you tell me what next week holds and you do not tell me one thing about how God sees me. Jeremiah looked straight at the same unfairness and called God righteous in the very breath he asked why, and the written word kept both halves of that sentence. In the name of Jesus I am saying you out loud instead of reading you in a mirror.
- Case I have been building in the quiet, you are a question and you have never once been evidence. Scripture opens the throne of grace and tells me to come boldly, and the Holy Spirit carries the asking the moment it leaves my mouth. The file closes the second the question finds His face.
- Lord, You are good to me and You are not running a queue where somebody else's full week took mine. Scripture says I may come to Your throne boldly, and Your Spirit is the one who gets me there on the evenings I would rather say nothing at all. I thank You, because the asking has never once cost me You, and I am asking.
Jeremiah 12:1
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