Six Years of Sunday Evenings

The third machine along still runs hot and everybody who comes in here regularly knows it, which is a kind of membership nobody applies for.

He is in the same plastic chair he always takes, the one with the crack across the seat, holding a carrier bag with the powder in it because the dispenser ate his money once in the first year and he has never trusted it since. Two students are sharing a bag of chips by the window. A woman is folding towels with the speed of somebody who has folded a great many towels. The hum of the driers goes on and on and it is not unpleasant, and outside it is one of those long light evenings that make a street look better than it is.

Six years he has been coming here. Not because he loves it. Because the machine at home went, and then everything else went, and there was never a single week in six years where buying a washing machine was the thing that got dealt with. So on Sunday evenings he comes here, and he sits, and the driers hum, and then he carries it all home again.

If somebody asked him how he is doing with all of it, he would say, honestly, that he is not doing anything with it. He is not winning. Nothing has moved. He is just still here. And if that sentence landed somewhere in your chest as you read it, then you already know the whole of what this page is about, because you have your own version of Sunday evenings, and you have been keeping it going for longer than anybody around you realizes, and you have privately filed the whole thing under losing.

Before anything else

Two things need saying at the top, and neither of them is teaching.

The first is about safety. If this long stretch includes somebody frightening you, hurting you, or making you pay for existing, then nothing on this page is telling you to stand there and take it. Standing has never once meant staying somewhere unsafe. Reach a person who can act: in the United States, 988 answers by call or text at any hour, and elsewhere your emergency number or a national support line will do the same. Put the article down and do that first. It will still be here.

The second is about who you are up against, and it matters because tiredness makes everything look like a face. Whatever this fight actually is, it is not a person. Not the one who let you down, not the one who never checked, not the one who has the easy life. Scripture is blunt about it: our struggle is not against flesh and blood. Nobody in your life is the enemy in this thing, and the relief of that is worth more than it first sounds, because it means you can stop losing to somebody you also love.

Now. You are still standing, and that is not the consolation prize, it is the assignment. That is not my encouragement to a tired stranger. It is what stands written in Scripture, where the instruction attached to the armor is stand, four times over, and no fifth verb; and it is the Holy Spirit who has been the actual reason your feet keep going out of that door.

My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.Psalm 73:26

What the psalm admits before it says anything comforting

Read the first half of that verse again, because most people skip it to get to the good bit and the good bit does not work without it.

My flesh and my heart may fail. He does not say might, in theory, someday. He says the body gives out and the inner man gives out too, and he says it in the middle of a psalm where he has just admitted he nearly lost his footing entirely. There is no pretending in it anywhere. The man is worn through and he says so out loud in the middle of a song that ended up in the hymnbook.

And then the turn, which is not about him recovering. God is the strength of my heart. Not God gives me strength for my heart, as though it were a delivery he collects and then uses. God is the strength of it. The strength you have been running on for six years was never in the tank; it was the person holding the tank.

You have been upheld this entire time by somebody other than yourself, and that has been going on whether or not one week of it felt like it. The word says God is the strength of the heart, and His Spirit is the one supplying it in a plastic chair on a Sunday evening, which is not a place anybody thinks to look for a miracle.

Standing is not the same as stalling

Here is what tiredness does to language. It takes the word standing and files it next to stuck, and after a few years you cannot tell them apart.

But they are not the same and they never were. Stalling is a car that has stopped. Standing is a person on their feet at the end of a long day who has not gone down. One is the absence of movement. The other is the presence of a person who is still there, which is an achievement so large that Scripture makes it the entire goal of the armor: having done everything, stand.

Notice that phrase. Having done everything. It assumes you already did the everything. It assumes the running about is over and the strategies are spent and there is nothing clever left, and into exactly that moment the instruction arrives, and the instruction is: be upright. That is it. That is the whole of it.

You have finished the doing and you are in the part of the verse that says stand, and you are doing it correctly right now. That is the promised shape of it in the written word, and it is His Spirit keeping a person on their feet, never a technique they perform well enough on a Sunday.

Nobody is asking you for one more push

I am not going to rally you. Being rallied has been tried on you before and it did nothing except make you tired in a new way.

I am not going to tell you it is nearly over either, because I do not know that and neither does anybody who says it to you. What I know is what is written, and what is written is not about the length of the thing. It is about who is under you while it goes on.

You are held today, in the sixth year, with nothing to show anybody. Scripture says God is the strength of the heart and the portion forever, and the Holy Spirit is the one making that a fact in your body rather than a nice line in a psalm.