Nobody Has Ever Asked About Her Tuesday

When her husband died, the house was full for eleven days.

Food arrived. Somebody did the lawn without being asked. Two women she had never been close to came and sat with her and were exactly right, and one of them held her hand for about forty minutes without saying anything, which is the thing she remembers most clearly out of the whole of it.

People are good in a crisis. She has never had one bad word to say about that, and she would tell you so today.

The trouble is what happens in the other forty-nine weeks.

She has been in that church since she was thirty-one. She has been prayed for in front of the whole congregation twice, both times for genuine emergencies, and both times it was sincere and she felt it.

And in forty years, nobody has ever asked her about a Tuesday.

Not a hard Tuesday. An ordinary one. What she does with a week in which nothing happens, whether she likes the way she spends it, what is going on with the thing she is actually thinking about, which at the moment is a small worry about her knee and a much larger and stranger question about whether she has been useful.

She would not know how to bring any of that up. It would sound like nothing. If she started saying it in the doorway on a Sunday, she can hear exactly how it would trail off.

So she says fine, thank you, and asks about them, and she is genuinely good at asking about them, and they walk away having had a nice conversation.

And she has begun to think of herself as somebody who is available for emergencies. That is the shape she has, in her own head. There is a version of her that gets attention, and it only exists when something terrible has happened.

Forty-nine weeks a year, she is fine.

And you have your own Tuesday. Whole seasons where nothing dramatic is going on, and nobody asks, and you have stopped expecting them to and started believing that the ordinary part of you is not the part anybody has ever wanted.

He kept count of the tossings, which nobody else was counting

There is a verse in Psalm fifty-six that is almost strange in how small its subject is.

You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book?Psalm 56:8

Tossings. That is what a person does at night when they cannot get settled and cannot say exactly why, and it is the least dramatic form of suffering there is, and it has no witnesses.

And that is what is being counted.

Not the great deliverances. Not the days when the psalmist was in actual danger, which he certainly was. The turning over in the dark, which nobody saw and nobody asked about the next morning.

You have had every ordinary night of forty years counted by Somebody who was present for all of them. It is written that You have kept count of my tossings and put my tears in Your bottle (Psalm 56:8), and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an odd small verse and makes it land on a woman who has begun to think of herself as available for emergencies.

Now the shape you have made of yourself, because it needs saying plainly.

Somebody who is available for emergencies.

That is not a description of your worth and it is not a description of what anybody thinks of you. It is a description of how a congregation of busy people actually works, which is that crises are visible and Tuesdays are not, and people respond to what they can see.

They are not withholding from you. They do not know there is anything to ask about, because you say fine, thank you, and then you ask about them, and you are excellent at it.

You are not being passed over, you are being unseen, and those two feel identical and are not the same thing at all. Scripture says man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and it is the Holy Spirit who has been looking at the part of you nobody has ever been in a position to see.

And the two things you are actually carrying right now.

A small worry about your knee, and a much larger and stranger question about whether you have been useful.

Look at those two side by side. One of them is the sort of thing you might mention to a doctor. The other one is the question of a whole life, and it has never been said out loud to anybody, and it is sitting in the same week as the knee because that is how a real week works: the enormous thing and the small thing occupy the same Tuesday.

You are carrying a question about your whole life in the middle of an ordinary week and it has never once been unwitnessed. It is written that You know when I sit down and when I rise up, You discern my thoughts from afar (Psalm 139:2), and it is the Holy Spirit who has been the discerning presence in a house where nobody has asked in forty years.

And what this page will not do.

It will not tell you to go and find somebody to talk to, or join something, or ask a woman at church to meet you. That gets said to people in your position constantly and it is a task handed to somebody who has already been carrying everything alone, and it makes the loneliness into a chore.

You are not being given a job, you are being told who has been in the room. Scripture says I am with you always, to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20), and it is His Spirit who is how that presence is actually delivered on a Tuesday afternoon in a quiet house.

And one thing about the forty minutes.

The woman who held your hand and said nothing: that was somebody staying in the plainest possible way, doing nothing, offering nothing, present. You remember it above everything else from those eleven days.

That is the shape of the accompanying you have been missing, and it is exactly the shape of what is available to you in the ordinary weeks, from Somebody who does not need it to be an emergency to sit down.

You already know what being accompanied feels like and you have been receiving it in a form you have not recognized. It is written that the Lord is near to the brokenhearted (Psalm 34:18), and near is a word about proximity and not about intervention, and it is His Spirit who is near in exactly that way on the forty-nine weeks nobody counts.