What God Did on a Tuesday

The microphone has a long lead and it comes down the row hand to hand, and by the time it reaches her the room is already at full volume.

She knows what she is going to say. She has said it for eleven years and it has never once failed to lift a building. The district meeting. The folding chairs. Her mother, who had not stood up without two people under her arms since the spring. The moment the woman at the front said the word knees, and her mother's hands came off the armrests, and the whole side of the hall saw it happen at the same second.

She tells it well. She has the timing on it now: the small pause before the part where her brother goes to pieces at the back, the drop in her voice at the end so the room can come up over the top of her. And it does. Somebody's tambourine finds her rhythm before she has finished the sentence. A woman two rows down is on her feet with both hands in the air. The organ walks in underneath and the place goes.

She sits down warm. Every word of it is true and none of it is stretched.

Tuesday morning, twenty to seven, her own kitchen. The kettle ticking as it cools. A school jumper with the cuff already gone. A form on the worktop that has needed signing since Friday and is now going to be signed in biro on a wet surface. Her boy is nine and eats his cereal standing up, which she has stopped fighting.

He says it with his mouth full, not looking at her.

"Mum. Has God done anything lately?"

Her mouth opens and the district meeting is right there, eleven years old, polished like a shoe by the door.

He gets there first. "You already told me that one."

He is not being clever. He is nine. He goes off to hunt for his bag and the radio keeps talking and she stands at the sink with her hands in water that has gone cold, and she is not offended. She is winded.

Because he did not ask her for a testimony. He asked her for a Tuesday.

And things do come when she reaches for them. The wrist that had kept her awake four nights running, until one morning she was scrubbing a pan and noticed it had simply stopped, and she said thank You out loud to an empty room and then went to work. The phone that rang at the exact moment she had her coat on and her mouth loaded with a sentence she could not have taken back. The bus that ran late on the one morning it needed to run late.

She cannot date a single one of them. Not one. She could take you to the row of chairs in that district hall and tell you the color of her mother's coat, and she cannot tell you what God did in this house last week, at this sink, and it has happened here far more often than it ever happened there.

You know this kitchen. One Sunday you can perform, and a decade of Tuesdays nobody ever counted.

Peter spent his last strength on what they already knew

There is an old man writing near the end of his life, and he knows it is near the end, and he says so in the very next breath. So watch what he decides to spend the remaining strength on, with a whole church listening and no time to waste.

Wherefore I will not be negligent to put you always in remembrance of these things, though ye know them, and be established in the present truth. Yea, I think it meet, as long as I am in this tabernacle, to stir you up by putting you in remembrance.2 Peter 1:12-13

Read what he is not doing. He is not correcting them. He is not handing them anything new. He says plainly that they know it already and that they are established in it, and then he says he intends to keep on reminding them anyway, for as long as he is in the tent, because established people forget. That is an apostle's final job description: stirring up a memory that had gone quiet in people who were not backslidden and were not confused.

So hear this before we go one line further. You are not a woman with a doctrine problem and you were never short of teaching. What has gone quiet in you is the memory, and 2 Peter 1:13 says a dying apostle poured out his last strength on exactly that, and the Holy Spirit whom Jesus named as the One who brings all things back to your remembrance is stirring it up at the sink while you read this.

Sunday has a microphone. Tuesday has nobody.

Let me tell you why the Tuesdays go missing, because it is not what you think and it is not a fault in you. It is not that Tuesday is smaller. Sunday arrives with a room, a microphone and four hundred witnesses, and the instant it happens there are four hundred people to make it real out loud. Tuesday arrives with a kettle. Nobody claps at a sink. And every one of us has been trained to keep what somebody else confirmed.

But God never built the covenant at Sunday scale. Look at the ground He chose for His own word to live on.

And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.Deuteronomy 6:6-7

Sitting in the house. Walking on the road. Lying down. Getting up. Four locations, and not one of them is a service, and not one of them has a microphone anywhere near it. The oath was set down at the scale of a weekday on purpose, by a God who knew that most of a life is Tuesday.

So turn and take this: you are already standing in the exact place God chose for His word to live, and you were standing in it before you got dressed this morning. Deuteronomy 6:7 puts it at the sitting and the walking and the lying down, and the Spirit is not waiting for the doors to open on Sunday to make that word breathe; He is at the worktop with you and He has been all week.

What the boy actually asked for

He asked for this week. Not for a headline, not for a hall going up, not for anything anybody would repeat. A nine year old wanted to know if God is a live thing in this house or a story his mother tells.

And here is the difference the whole morning turns on. A highlight reel holds eleven items in eleven years and every one of them is loud. A record holds last Tuesday, and a wrist, and a bus that ran late.

I am saying the next part with my hand on your shoulder, because this is where women like us get it wrong and then quietly conclude something terrible about ourselves. A small Tuesday is not a lesser grade of thing God did. You have a record, and it is not thin, it is unwritten, and those two conditions are nothing like each other. Scripture says forget not all his benefits, in Psalm 103:2, and it says benefits, plural, ordinary and daily and countable, and the Holy Spirit is breathing on that plural right now while you sit there trying to remember a date.