Twenty past nine on a Wednesday, and Fran is on the bench in the market square, the one under the plane trees with the little brass plate on the back that says Doris Pargeter, who liked this view.
There is no market on a Wednesday. There is paving, and pigeons doing their unhurried business around the litter bin, and the library steps, and a man putting out an A board for a hairdresser.
She has a tea from the place by the bus stop in a paper cup that is slightly too hot to hold properly, so she holds it by the rim with two fingers and puts it down a lot.
She is not sad. That is the part she keeps having to explain, mostly to herself. Nothing is wrong. Immy went in at nine with her book bag and her cardigan on inside out and did not look back, which is exactly what you want.
Fourteen months ago at twenty past nine on a Wednesday, Fran was somewhere extremely specific. Level two, the family room off the ward corridor, the chair by the window with her coat over the back of it, which everybody understood was her chair. There was a whiteboard with Immy's name on it in green marker and the name of whoever was on shift. There was a folder. There was a plastic wallet with a parking permit in it, and at twenty past nine there was a ward round.
She was expected. Every hour of that week, somebody expected her somewhere.
Immy is fine. Immy is doing fractions and has strong opinions about a girl called Halle.
And the week has nothing in it.
That is not a complaint and it is not depression, and Fran has checked, twice, with a doctor who was very kind about it. She sleeps. She eats. She laughs at things. Her husband is good. She is not in trouble.
She simply has nowhere she is due.
Everybody else has a shape. Karen has Pilates on a Tuesday and the school library on a Thursday. Her mother has the lunch club, and a lift to it, and a sponge to bring. Her husband has work, obviously, and five-a-side, and a group chat about five-a-side. When people describe their week, they use verbs.
Fran has drop off and pick up, and a square in between.
And people ask her, warmly, at parties and at the gate, what she is going to do now. They mean it kindly. They mean it as an opening. And do is a verb she cannot get her hands round at the moment, and the honest answer is that she does not know, and she has stopped saying so because of what it does to people's faces.
Ten feet in front of the bench, set flush into the paving at the corner by the chemist, there is a worn round stone with a brass plate on the top of it. It marks the old parish boundary. Everybody in this town has walked over it every day of their lives without once looking down.
Fran looks at it most Wednesdays. She could not tell you why.
I want to be careful with you, because you have already worked out why you are still reading.
It might not be a square. It might be the layby on the ring road. It might be the far end of a retail park where you sit in the car with the engine off. It might be that you go home and do a job that takes forty minutes and then it is only twenty to eleven.
And if you are reading this from the corridor, with the ward round still ahead of you, put this down. You have today to get through. Go and get through today.
Somebody already set the boundaries
Paul is standing in the middle of Athens, in a city absolutely stuffed with people who measure a life by what it produces, and he says this to them.
And He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their dwelling places.Acts 17:26
Determined. Past tense.
Not being determined. Not up for negotiation, not pending your decision, not waiting on a form you have not filled in. Acts 17:26 puts the appointed times and the boundaries in the finished column, done long before you got here, and the Holy Spirit did not reopen that file when the ward rounds stopped. You are inside your appointed time this morning, on a bench with somebody else's name on the back of it, holding a tea you cannot hold.
And that is not a nice thought I am having on your behalf.
That is what Paul stood up and said in a public square, Acts 17:26, to a crowd who would have found it faintly insulting, and it is what the Spirit has been saying over your Wednesday for fourteen months while you have been apologizing for it. You are placed. Not parked, not idling, not between things. Placed, which is a word with somebody else's hands in it.
The question with no floor under it
Everybody keeps asking the same thing. So what will you do now?
It is a kind question. It comes from people who love you and want good things for you and cannot quite bear to watch you sit still. And it has no floor under it, because it assumes that a person is a set of activities, and that an empty diary is a person with a problem.
Acts 17:28 has a floor. In Him we live and move and have our being, Paul says, and being is on that list, third, standing next to the other two as an equal. Living, moving, being. The Spirit is not waiting at the edge of the square with a form for you to complete. You have a place before you have a plan, and you always did.
I am not going to ask you what you are going to do. I am not going to suggest a course, a group, a rota, a direction, or three small steps. Being planted is a standing, not a strategy, and if I handed you a strategy I would have quietly turned this back into a task and put the whole weight on you again.
Notice the vocabulary too, because it is a surveyor's vocabulary. Boundaries. Dwelling places. Those are words about ground that somebody else marked out and wrote down, and nobody draws their own boundary and then congratulates themselves on where it landed. Acts 17:26 has the marking out already finished and in God's hands, and the Spirit keeps pressing that sentence into people who are convinced they are nowhere in particular. You are standing inside a boundary you did not draw, at twenty past nine on a Wednesday, and it was drawn well.
There is one more thing in the Athens speech that I do not want you to walk past.
Paul says the reason for the appointed times and the boundaries is that people would seek Him, and that He is not far from any one of us. Acts 17:27. Not far. That is the purpose clause of the whole sentence, and notice that it is not a productivity clause, it is a proximity one. The Spirit is what makes not far into a fact rather than a comforting phrase. You are near Him on that bench, this morning, having achieved absolutely nothing since nine o'clock.
And Psalm 92:13 says planted in the house of the Lord, which is a passive verb with somebody else's hands all over it. Nobody plants themselves. The Spirit is not standing over your Wednesday asking you to get your own roots into the ground, because the written word already put the planting in His column. You are planted, and the standing is yours already, whether or not one single thing in your week has a name.
So here is the turn, and it is not an idea for Wednesday.
You do not have to fill the six hours in order to be legitimately somewhere. The emptiness of the diary is not a statement about your standing, and there is nothing in Acts 17 that makes a person's dwelling place conditional on what they get done in it, and the Spirit has not once looked at your morning and wondered what you are for. You are held in your place while your week stays completely unnamed.
And I am not going to tell you what is coming. I do not know whether something will arrive that gives your Wednesday a shape, and I am not going to sell you a better year to make this one bearable, because a promise like that would only put you back to waiting, and waiting is the thing you have finally stopped doing.
What I can tell you is what is already settled. Acts 17:26 says the times and the boundaries were determined by God, and the Spirit is the one who turns a determined boundary into ground under a person rather than a line on a map. You are in your place. It is not a holding pen and it never was.
The stone at the corner by the chemist marks a line that somebody drew in a year nobody in that town can now remember. Nobody asks it to achieve anything. It is simply where the boundary runs, and the boundary is how anyone knows which parish they are standing in.
Declare this over yourself
None of this gets worked up out of your own reserves on a Wednesday morning. The standing to say it is yours in Christ, given rather than earned, and it goes out in His name and not on the strength of what your diary looks like. Say them with both feet down, and then leave the outcome with Him, in His timing and however He chooses to answer.
- Wednesday morning, you do not get to be a gap. Acts 17:26 says the appointed times and the boundaries of our dwelling were determined by God, and a bench under the plane trees at twenty past nine sits inside them. I am standing exactly where He put me.
- Fear, you do not get to call an unnamed week a verdict on the woman living it. In the name of Jesus I am refusing to read an empty diary as evidence about myself. I am planted, and I never once had to plant myself.
- Lord, You set the boundaries of where I dwell before I ever arrived in this town, and I chose none of it. The written word says planted in the house of the Lord, and Your Holy Spirit has been standing beside me at twenty past nine the whole time. My feet are flat on the ground and I am not going anywhere.
Acts 17:26
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