The Wednesday I Stopped Expecting

She rents the chair by the window. The rent on it is due the same on a Wednesday with nobody in as it is on a Saturday in December, which is the arrangement, and she agreed to it, and it was fine for a long while.

The page for today has two names on it. Had two. One rang at half eight to move to the week after next, in the apologetic voice people use, and she said of course, no trouble, see you then, and meant it, because it is not that woman's fault.

So there is one name, at ten past three, and it is twenty to eleven now.

She sweeps. There is hair on the floor from the other two chairs and it is not her hair to sweep, but the broom is in her hand and the alternative is sitting down where the mirror is.

Here is the part she has not told anybody. She asked God about this. Not vaguely and not in general terms. She asked plainly, by name, about the diary and the chair and the week, and she asked it in the spring, and she has gone on asking, and what came back was nothing.

Not a no. A no would at least be a shape. Nothing came. The page stayed as it was and the weeks kept turning over, and somewhere in the last little while, on some Wednesday she could not now point to, she noticed that she had stopped expecting anything to come at all.

She still prays. That is the strange bit. She prays for the woman at the next chair whose father is poorly, and she means it, and it costs her nothing to believe God is listening to that one. It is only her own thing that has gone quiet, and she has stopped bringing it, the way you stop ringing a number that never picks up.

That is where you are as well, or you would not have opened this on a Wednesday. So I am going to stay in it with you, and I am not going to explain it.

What I am not going to do

I could give you a reason for the quiet. It would take about a paragraph and it would sound wise, and you would carry it out of here and it would come apart on you by Friday, because it would not be true. I do not know why nothing came. Nobody who tells you they do has been given that, and a reason invented over your head is worse than a silence.

So the reason stays where it belongs, with God, and I will spend what I have on something else.

I will spend it on the verdict. Because a silence does not stay a silence for long: a person standing in one starts reading it, and what gets read off it is almost always a sentence about themselves. He answers for the woman at the next chair, and not for me. Something is wrong with me. Something has been noticed and not said.

Hear this, and hear it early, before we go one line further. You are not disqualified. There is no register anywhere with your name against a mark on it, and the quiet you are standing in is not God's opinion of you, because Scripture says nothing at all can separate you from His love in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:38 and 39), and the Holy Spirit is in you as the proof of it while you sweep a floor at twenty to eleven.

The psalm they did not tidy up

There is a psalm in the middle of the book that nobody preaches on, and it is the kindest thing in it for a Wednesday like yours.

O LORD, God of my salvation, I cry out day and night before you.Psalm 88:1

That is how it opens. Day and night. And then it goes on for seventeen more verses in the same direction, and the last line of it is about darkness, and it never turns. No resolution, no yet, no sunrise in the final verse. It is the only psalm in the collection that ends where it started, in the dark, with the asking still unanswered.

And it is in the Bible.

Sit with that a minute, because it is doing something enormous for you. Somebody could have tidied it. Somebody could have added four lines at the bottom about how God came through in the end, and no editor did, in all those centuries, and the reason is that the record was meant to hold a person who asked and asked and got nothing, so that no believer standing in that exact place would ever be able to think they had fallen off the edge of the book.

You are inside the Scriptures where you are standing. That page is written for you, not around you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who kept it in the collection so that a woman with a broom in her hand would find her own week already in there.

Notice what the psalm does not do. It does not explain itself. The man never works out why, he never finds the key he was missing, and he does not get told what it was for. What he does is keep talking to God, in the dark, at the top of his voice, and heaven kept the transcript.

Nearness is not a payment

Here is the thing the silence gets wrong about God, and it is worth naming plainly.

Quiet from a person means distance, because that is how people work. A friend goes quiet on you and something is up; you go through the last few conversations looking for what you said. And then we take that arithmetic, which is honest and hard-won and completely correct about people, and we run it on God, and it gives the wrong answer for the first time.

You have His nearness right now and it is not wages. It was never a thing you were paid for good weeks and docked for bad ones, because Christ bought that access outright and Hebrews 10:19 calls it a confidence you already hold, and the Holy Spirit is God Himself with you in the room, not a receipt for something you delivered.

Where I grew up, the mountain would go into cloud for days at a time. You could stand at the window and see nothing at all where the whole weight of it should be. Nobody in that house ever once thought the mountain had gone. It was closer than the weather that was hiding it, and it had not moved an inch, and the not seeing it was a fact about the air and never a fact about the mountain.

I am not going to tell you the cloud has a purpose. That is the move I refused at the top and I am still refusing it. What I am telling you is what is behind it: He is here, He has not withdrawn Himself over anything you did, and you are not standing outside anything. Hebrews 13:5 has Him saying He will never leave nor forsake, with no clause about answered weeks attached to it, and the Holy Spirit is that nearness, in this room, today.