Thursday Without the Binder

For twenty-two months, Thursday evening was the file.

Seven o'clock, when the plates were done. The lever arch binder out of the cupboard under the stairs and onto the kitchen table, and the table wiped first, always, because Ruth could not put that binder down on crumbs.

The tabs were written by hand in green biro. TIMELINE. EMAILS. ROTA. WITNESSES. NOT SENT. That last one was the fattest section, which tells you most of what you need to know about twenty-two months.

She was a deputy manager. Somebody made a complaint, and the complaint went to a body with a letterhead, and the body with the letterhead wrote to her twice a year in language that took her forty minutes to understand and four days to stop hearing. She was suspended in the October. She was not, in the end, anything at all. She was cleared in June, in a paragraph that ran to two lines, and one of those lines was her reference number.

The binder went up to the loft on the second Saturday in July. Her son carried it. He made a joke about the weight of it and she laughed, and she meant the laugh, and that evening she came down at seven out of pure habit and stood in the kitchen looking at a wiped table with nothing on it.

That was six weeks ago.

She has cleaned the oven twice. She has watched most of a series about people restoring canal boats and could not tell you one thing that happened in it. Twice she has gone up the loft ladder as far as her shoulders, not to get the binder, just to see that it was there.

Here is the part she has not said to anybody, not to her son, not to the woman at work who was kind the whole way through.

She was better at the hard version.

She knew what Thursday was for. She knew what she was for at seven o'clock on a Thursday. There was a fight and she was in it and every single evening had a job. Now there is a wiped table and three hours and a woman standing in a kitchen with her hands open at her sides, not because she is at peace, but because she genuinely does not know what to do with them.

You know what your binder was.

It might have been a folder. It might have been a phone call every Sunday to a solicitor's answerphone. It might have been the drive to the hospital, or the hour after the children went up when you did the worrying. It had a slot in the week and the slot has gone, and the strange thing nobody warns you about is that the slot going is not the same as being free.

You did not come out of it into a life. You came out of it into a Thursday.

A week with no shape in it

So hear who is actually talking about your Thursday, because it is not me.

Isaiah 43:19 says: look, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. Read the question in the middle of it. That is not a rebuke, and it was never said to people who were managing well. It was said to a nation standing in a desert who could not see one green thing from where they were, and the Holy Spirit is saying it now over a wiped kitchen table: you have a new thing already springing, and your not being able to see it is written into the verse.

That is not my optimism about your evening. I would not dare.

Look at the verb He picks, though, because the verb is the whole comfort. It springs forth. Not it is scheduled, not it is coming after a suitable interval, not it starts when you have pulled yourself together. Springs. Present tense. Now, in ground you are standing on while you are quite certain nothing whatever is happening in it. The Spirit does not wait for your calendar to fill up before Scripture becomes true in your house.

And I want to be plain about what is not being said, because this site is full of people who have had a bright promise dropped on them by somebody who then went home.

Nobody is telling you the autumn will be better. That is not what the verse says and it is not mine to say. Isaiah does not describe the way before Israel walks it. He says God makes one, in the wilderness, which is a strange place to build a road and exactly the place He said He would build it, and the Spirit is the one carrying that sentence into a life that currently has three empty hours in it on a Thursday.

Two years taught you that a useful evening is one with a document in it.

That was survival, and it was intelligent, and it kept you upright. It is also not a measurement of a life, and nothing written anywhere in Scripture makes an evening's worth depend on what got done in it. You have a value at seven o'clock on Thursday that does not move when the binder goes up the ladder, and the Spirit has been saying so quietly since July, and you have been filing it as a nice thought.

Look, I am doing a new thing. Now it springs forth; do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.Isaiah 43:19