Every Single Evening At Six

Six o'clock, and the light is going amber at the end of the street. Her key knows this lock better than her own now, the little lift you have to give the door before it will turn.

The hallway smells the way it has smelled for two years. Furniture polish and old carpet and something faintly like toast. She reaches left without looking and puts the hall light on, and the shade throws that same soft circle down onto the runner.

Coat on the third hook. It has been the third hook since the first week.

Then the eleven things. The mail sorted into two piles, one of which goes in the trash and one of which does not. The pills counted out into the little plastic days. The kettle. The window in the back room opened four inches and then closed again in twenty minutes. The television turned down from the volume that hurts to the volume that is merely loud. The same three questions asked, and answered, and asked again eight minutes later, and answered again in exactly the same tone, because she decided a long time ago that the tone was going to be the same every time and she has kept that decision.

The story about the neighbor's dog. Seventh time this month. She laughs in the right place. She always laughs in the right place.

At twenty past seven she says the same good night, and pulls the door, and stands on the step for a second while it clicks.

And then in the car, before she turns the key, without deciding to, she does the arithmetic. Two years. Give or take. Seven hundred and thirty.

The number arrives fully formed, and it frightens her, and she sits there in the dark with her hands in her lap not knowing which part frightens her most.

Because you do not count something you are simply doing. You count what you are enduring. Somewhere in there it changed categories, and nobody rang a bell when it happened, and she has been going in at six every evening ever since without noticing that the thing itself had quietly become a tally.

You know what the counting means, or you would not have felt your stomach drop just then. It is not that you stopped loving anybody. It is that you have started to be afraid of your own arithmetic, and of what it says about you that you now know the number by heart.

Weary In The Doing Is Not A Verdict On Your Love

You are not failing at this. Galatians 6:9 was written to people who were already in it and already tired, and the Spirit is not standing over your car door waiting for a better attitude before that verse applies to you.

And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.Galatians 6:9

Notice who the sentence is addressed to. Not people wondering whether to begin. People in the middle of the well doing, far enough in to have gone weary at it, which means the weariness was expected, described and accounted for by the apostle before the ink was dry.

Most modern translations render that first phrase as let us not grow weary, or let us not lose heart, and the second reading is worth sitting with. It is not primarily about the body. The body is allowed to be tired; the body is tired for good reasons and there is no shame in a tired body. What Paul is putting his hand on is the quieter thing, the losing heart, the moment when the doing goes on but the meaning goes out of it and you start counting.

You have been seen in the exact place you are standing, and it was described in advance. The Spirit knew where you would be in the second year long before you found this page, and it is written into Galatians 6:9 in five words: weary in well doing.

Two Years Of Strength Was Never Issued To You

Here is the thing that makes the arithmetic so heavy, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.

When you sat in the car and thought seven hundred and thirty, you were not being asked to do seven hundred and thirty evenings. You were doing one. But your mind laid all of them out on the seat beside you at once, and then asked whether you had enough for the pile, and of course you do not. Nobody does. Nobody ever has.

There is a reason for that, and it is not a defect in you.

When God fed a nation in the wilderness, the bread came a day at a time and it could not be stockpiled. Whatever anybody gathered beyond the day went bad by morning. That was not stinginess. It was the shape of the supply, on purpose, so that the people would have to come back and find Him there again in the morning, which they did, for forty years.

You are being supplied at the hour and never in advance. That is Scripture, not a coping strategy, and His Spirit is what makes it move.

So the fact that you cannot feel two years' worth of strength tonight is not evidence that you are running dry. It is evidence that you are on daily rations, like everybody God has ever carried anywhere. The tank was never meant to read full for a distance you have not driven yet.

You have been given exactly enough for one evening, which is the only evening on offer. You are not taking my word for it. His word puts the season in God's hands and the doing in yours, and the Spirit is what carries that off a page and into a car in the dark at half past seven.

And one plain thing before we go further, because it matters more than anything else here. If what is happening in that house is harming you, endurance is not the answer to it and nothing on this page is telling you to stay. Danger is not something to outlast. Getting help is the merciful move, for you and for everybody involved, and there is no version of faithfulness that requires a person to be hurt on a schedule.