Every Thursday, Same Room

He sets two cups down on the same table and takes the same chair, and this is the fourth year of Thursdays, and nothing in this room has changed at all.

Half past two. The chair by the window that gets the light and the chair opposite that does not, and he has always taken the one that does not, which was a decision he made in the first month and has never revisited. There is a clock on the shelf that is four minutes fast and has been four minutes fast since he started coming.

Same tea. Same two spoons of sugar in the one that is not his, and he stopped asking about that a long time ago because asking is a small unkindness when the answer never changes.

The conversation goes where it goes. Some Thursdays there is a good twenty minutes. Some Thursdays there is nothing, and they sit, and the clock is four minutes fast, and the light moves across the arm of the good chair, and he leaves at half past three.

Four years.

And in the car afterward, which is where he has all of his honest thoughts, he does the arithmetic he does most weeks. Two hundred Thursdays, give or take. Two hundred pairs of cups. And he could not point to one thing that is different because of any of it.

He is not resentful. It is important to say that. He would keep coming if it were four hundred. But he is tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep, and underneath the tiredness there is a sentence he has never said to anybody, which is: I do not think I am doing anything.

He puts the key in. He goes home.

That is you, and your Thursday might be a ward, a phone call, a landing outside a door, a person you sit with who does not know you come.

Two plain things before anything else. If somebody in your life is frightening you or hurting you, nothing here is telling you to keep going back and taking it; tell one person today who can act. And whatever this is, it is not a person. Scripture is direct that the struggle is not against flesh and blood, and that is a mercy rather than a technicality, because it means you can stop losing to somebody you also love.

And I am not going to rally you. Being rallied has been tried on you and it produced a new kind of tiredness. Nor am I going to tell you that something is about to shift in that room, because I do not know that, and neither does anybody who says it to you.

Paul puts two things in one sentence and both of them are happening

There is a verse where Paul says two things about the same period of time, and the whole use of it is that he does not choose between them.

For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.2 Corinthians 4:16

Our outward man perish.

He does not soften that. Perish is not a gentle word and he picks it on purpose. Whatever is visible, whatever can be counted, whatever a person could point to and say this is what I have to show, is wearing out, and he grants it without any argument at all.

And in the same breath, about the same days: the inward man is renewed day by day.

Day by day. Which is the phrase that matters at half past two on a Thursday, because it means the renewing is not stored up for a moment later when something finally happens. It is being done in the days themselves. In the two hundred of them. On the ones with a good twenty minutes and on the ones where two people sat with a clock that is four minutes fast.

You are being renewed in the days you cannot point to, and it has been happening in every one of the two hundred. That is not a lift for a man in a car: 2 Corinthians 4:16 grants the perishing in full and puts the renewing in the same period rather than after it, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an invisible thing real in a body that has nothing to show rather than the evidence anybody can assemble on the drive home.

Nothing visible is not the same as nothing

Here is what four years does to language, and it is worth pulling apart carefully.

The arithmetic he does in the car is accurate. Two hundred Thursdays and nothing he can point to. That is not self pity and it is not a distortion; it is a correct summary of the visible.

The error is one word further on. He has taken nothing visible and written it down as nothing, and those are not the same quantity, and Paul spends an entire passage on the difference.

Look at what the man actually cannot see. He cannot see what four years of somebody turning up does to a person's sense of whether they are worth turning up for. He cannot see the Thursdays that were survivable because there was one on the calendar. He cannot see what the clock being four minutes fast has meant to somebody who has almost nothing else that is the same every week.

You have not been doing nothing, and the ledger you have been keeping only ever had one column in it. The written word grants that the visible wears out and puts the renewing in the same days, and the Spirit of God has been at work in a front room for four years, never the results anybody can produce at half past three.

And nobody is asking you for one more push. There is no push in this. The instruction attached to the whole armor is stand, four times in six verses and no fifth verb, and turning up on a Thursday is that verb in ordinary clothes.

You are standing, and standing was always the assignment. Scripture calls a person who is still there at the end of it standing, and His Spirit is what has had a man in the chair that does not get the light for four years.