The Alarm at Twenty to Seven

For fourteen months Priya knew exactly what a Tuesday was.

Alarm at twenty to seven. Out of the house by ten past, because of the roadworks. The A-road in the dark. The multi story, level four, because the barrier on level three sticks and you lose six minutes. Hand gel. Lift. The ward round at nine, which never actually happened at nine, and the registrar who held his clipboard flat against his chest like a shield. Coffee from the machine at the end of the corridor that will make you a small or a large and has never in its life made a medium.

She could have done it asleep. Some weeks she nearly did.

Esme was discharged in the spring and went back to school in the summer term. She has done sports day. She has fallen out with a girl called Marnie and made it up again. She is fine.

It is Tuesday. It is quarter past nine.

Priya is standing in her own kitchen with a cup of tea going cold on the worktop, and the radio is talking about a queue on the A-road she does not drive any more, and she has wiped the same three feet of worktop three times.

She still sets the alarm for twenty to seven. She turns it off before it rings, every morning, and she could not tell you why.

The laminated sheet with the ward round times is still on the fridge under a magnet shaped like a strawberry. She has not taken it down. It is not sentiment. She just does not know what would go there instead.

And on Sunday, Esme asked if they could do something on Tuesday, because it is an inset day.

Priya said we will see.

Then she went and stood in the utility room for a minute with her hand on top of the machine, because the honest answer was that she has no idea what people do on a Tuesday. She knows what a Tuesday is for when there is a ward round in it. She does not know what one is for otherwise.

This is where I stop talking about Priya, because you already know which hours came back to you.

It might not be a Tuesday. It might be the Thursday evening that used to be the drive. It might be Sunday afternoons. It might be that a whole shape of your week has been handed back and it sits there like an empty chair at a table you have not laid.

You are not lost. You are extremely capable, and you are unemployed from an occupation that no longer exists.

And if you are reading this from the corridor, with the ward round still an hour away, none of this is asking you to think about afterwards. You have today to get through. Get through today.

What abundance is actually set against

There is one verse everybody reaches for here, and it has been used badly enough that I want to slow down before I hand it to you.

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it in abundance.John 10:10

You've had that quoted at you off a mug, and it was made to mean a bigger year, a better house, a run of good luck. I am not going to do that to you, and neither is the Holy Spirit, because look at what the sentence is actually set against. Abundance is contrasted with theft. Not with ordinary. Not with small. With a thief. You have not been promised a larger life. You have the one that was not carried off, and quarter past nine on a Tuesday is inside it.

That distinction is the whole difference between comfort and pressure. If abundance means more, then an ordinary morning is a failure and you had better start filling it. If abundance means unstolen, then an ordinary morning is the point.

And there is a line one verse earlier that almost nobody quotes, which is the one I would put on your fridge.

He says that whoever enters through Him will go in and out and find pasture. In and out. That is John 10:9, and that is a day. That is all a day has ever been: out in the morning, back before dark, fed somewhere in the middle. You have a Tuesday to go out into and come back from, and the Spirit is not standing over that Tuesday asking what you intend to make of it.

You had a purpose so sharp it could be laminated. Nine o'clock, level four, hand gel. Nothing has replaced it, and the silence where it was is loud.

I cannot tell you what to put at quarter past nine. I do not know your kitchen. Luke 10:42 knows something better than a schedule: one thing is necessary, and the woman who sat down chose the good portion, and it will not be taken away from her. And the Spirit is the one saying that over a woman who has wiped the same worktop three times. You have a portion nobody can come back for.

Going out is not a project

Somewhere in the last year you probably stopped being a person and became a function, and functions do not have Tuesdays. They have shifts.

None of that is a nice thought I had for you. It is what the Spirit has been saying through Romans 8:15 the whole time: you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but the Spirit of adoption, in whom we cry out, Abba, Father. You are a daughter in a kitchen on a weekday morning. You are not staff whose shift has ended and who is now waiting to be told where to stand.

Which changes what an empty morning is. An empty morning for a function is a fault to be corrected. An empty morning for a daughter is just Tuesday.

So the gate. In John 10 it swings both ways, and that is the part I keep coming back to. A shepherd who bolts it and stands in front of it has a flock, but he does not have a life, and the sheep never see grass. You have a gate that opens outward, and the Holy Spirit has been standing at it since spring, not with a rota, just holding it.