The Towels Came Out Warm

The book is open at Tuesday and there are three names on it, all of them before noon.

She writes in pencil, because there was a year when the page had to be rubbed out and rearranged twice a week, and the pencil is a habit left over from it. Now there is a lot of white space to the right of the names. She puts the pencil down and does not look at the page again.

She sweeps anyway. There is not much on the floor to sweep, but sweeping is what you do at half past two, so she does it, and she wipes the mirror down, and she folds the towels as they come out of the dryer.

The chair is hers by the week. That is the arrangement and it is a fair one, and it does not know or care whether anybody sat in it. Sandra at the front has a full book and is lovely about it and has never once made her feel small, which is not the problem and has never been the problem.

The problem starts at night.

It starts at about eleven, when the flat is quiet, and it runs like this. If the car goes. If the boiler goes. If Sandra needs the chair for somebody who can fill it. Each of those has a branch off it, and each branch has another branch, and she has been down every one of them so many times that she could walk them in the dark, which is exactly what she is doing.

She is not being silly. That is the part nobody understands. There is nothing behind her. Every single one of those branches is real, and she has done the arithmetic often enough to know she is right about all of them.

She is not frightened of a story. She is frightened of a fact.

And you know the difference between those two perfectly well. That is why you are still awake.

Eleven o'clock is not unbelief

Let me say the first thing plainly, because plenty of people say it the other way round and it does real damage.

Your fear is accurate. The branches are real branches. If the car goes it is a genuine problem, and there is nothing behind it, and a woman who has worked that out honestly is not a woman with a small faith. She is a woman who can count.

Nobody here is going to tell you that being right about your own week is unbelief. That is a cruel thing to say to somebody at eleven at night, it is not in Scripture anywhere, and the Holy Spirit has never once used it on you.

You are held tonight exactly as you are, wide awake and correct about the car. Psalm 121:3 says the one who keeps you does not slumber, which means somebody is up at this hour and it is not only you, and His Spirit is in the room with you while you lie there.

What I want to look at is the difference between counting and walking. You have counted. You counted a long time ago and you got it right, and what has been happening since eleven is not counting.

Sufficient is a measuring word

Paul asked three times about something and the answer he got was not the removal of it. My grace is sufficient for thee (2 Corinthians 12:9).

Sufficient. Stop on that word, because it is doing more work than people usually let it do. It is not a soft word, it is a measuring word. Sufficient means enough for the thing. Enough for this, exactly, with the size of it taken.

Here is what that means for a woman lying awake walking branches. The grace was measured against what is actually in front of you. It was not measured against the eleven o'clock version, which is bigger, because the eleven o'clock version has every branch happening at once and that has never been anybody's actual Tuesday.

So when you go down those branches and find that you cannot cope with what is waiting at the end of them, you are meeting no deficiency in yourself at all. You are meeting the plain fact that strength for a thing which has not happened has not been issued yet, and an unissued ration is not a shortage. It was never in your hands, because it was never due to be there yet.

You have what today needs. That is a finished thing, given and in your hands right now, and it is what His word means by the word sufficient, and His Spirit is the one who supplies it as the day goes rather than in advance of it.

What He is like about a life that runs day to day

Now Exodus 16, which is the passage this whole site is quietly standing on.

He fed a whole nation with something that arrived in the morning and could not be kept. They gathered it every morning, every man according to his eating, and when the sun grew hot it melted (Exodus 16:21). Some of them tried to store it and it bred worms.

Read carefully what that is and what it is not. It is not a lesson God arranged in order to teach anybody a virtue about going without, and He never once told them off for wanting a store. What it is, is a picture of what God is like about a life that runs day to day. Completely unembarrassed by it. In it every morning. Present at the same hour with the same thing.

And it tells you nothing whatsoever about why yours runs day to day. I am not going to pretend that it does. There is no message hidden in your empty page, and anybody who hands you a reason for it is handing you their own guess with God's name written on the front of it.

This is also not an argument against planning. Keep the book. Keep the pencil. Look for the work, take the help you are entitled to, ask Sandra about the Thursdays. Making a plan once is a good day's work, and it is not the thing that is eating your nights.

You are met every single morning by a God who has done this before and does not find it strange, and that is written into the oldest part of the book (Exodus 16:4), and the same Spirit who was over the camp is over your flat.