Nobody Ever Showed Him a Tuesday

The question came from his son, who was nine and meant nothing by it. What do you do on a normal Tuesday.

He opened his mouth and nothing came out, and he made a joke, and the boy went off, and he stood in a yard holding a wrench and could not answer the question. Not because his life is chaotic. His life now is extremely ordinary. He gets up, he works, he eats, he sleeps, and if you charted it you would call it stable.

The problem is that he does not know what it is supposed to feel like. He has no interior reference for a Tuesday. He knows what a Tuesday costs and what happens on one, and he has no idea whether the way he experiences it is the way anybody else does, because no two weeks of his childhood were the same and he never got a baseline.

That sounds abstract until you see what it actually does. He does not know when to relax, so he does not. He cannot tell an ordinary bad mood from something going wrong, so every bad mood is a possible emergency. And he cannot tell when a good stretch is normal, so when things are calm he waits, and the waiting is the tiring part.

I am going to leave the childhood alone. That is deliberate. I am not going to explain the man by narrating his early life to him, and I am not going to put his people on trial in front of a stranger, because I do not know them and neither does anybody reading this, and turning a family into a diagnosis is a trick that costs a reader something and gives him nothing he can use.

What I will say is a description. Some people did not get a baseline. That is not a defect in them and it is not a debt anybody owes them. It is a missing reference point, and reference points can be built, slowly, out of very ordinary material.

Something already arrives every morning

Let me put a line down and pay attention to how often it happens.

It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22-23

New every morning. Not new when things settle down. Not new when a man has worked out what a normal week feels like. Every morning, which includes all the ones he has no reference for, and all the ones he spent waiting for the calm to break.

And notice the book it is in. Lamentations is five chapters of a man looking at a destroyed city. That sentence is in the middle of the bleakest book in the Bible, written by somebody with no stable week of his own to compare anything to.

You are met every morning by something that has been arriving on schedule your whole life. That is not a nice thought handed to a man in a yard. It is what is written in Lamentations 3, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a written line and puts it into a body that has no baseline. The weeks were not regular. The mercies were.

And look at the last phrase, which is the one that got made into a hymn: great is thy faithfulness. Faithfulness is a word about consistency over time. It is the exact quality he has never had a sample of, applied to God, in a book about ruin.

You have been receiving something perfectly consistent since before you could have noticed it. Lamentations 3:23 is where the word puts it, and His Spirit is the one who makes an old lament land on a porch step in the evening.

A reference point can be built

Now the practical heart of it, and it is not insight.

He is not going to acquire a sense of an ordinary Tuesday by understanding why he does not have one. That is worth saying twice, because a great deal of energy gets spent that way. A reference point is not a conclusion. It is an accumulation. A body builds one the same way it builds any other expectation, which is by having the same thing happen enough times that it stops being news.

Which means the material is astonishingly ordinary. Not a program. Not a routine in the sense of a schedule. One thing, at the same hour, done on purpose, often enough that his body starts to expect it.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.Ecclesiastes 3:1

That verse is usually quoted at funerals. Read it as an ordinary structural claim instead: time has shape, and the shape is God's rather than a thing a person has to invent from nothing.

You were put into time that already has a shape, and you were never asked to build one from scratch. Ecclesiastes 3:1 is where that stands, and it is the Spirit who lets a man stop trying to construct a week out of his own head.

You are held this evening, on an ordinary Tuesday you cannot evaluate, and the holding does not require you to know what it is supposed to feel like. It is written that the mercies are new every morning and great is His faithfulness, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that true in a body with no baseline in it.

If any of this ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor the plain truth about not being able to tell a bad mood from an emergency. That is a real and describable thing and there are real people who help with it, and being held by God has never been a reason to work it out alone in a yard.