The Ordinary Tuesdays In Between

She prays it every January and she has done since 2017.

Not a resolution. She would be offended if you called it that. It is a real prayer, prayed properly, usually on the first Tuesday of the year in that building with about fifteen other people in it, and it is for fire.

She wants what she has read about and what her grandmother described twice and what she has seen once, in a room in another country when she was twenty-six, and which has not happened to her since.

Nine Januaries.

And she is not bitter and she has not stopped, and she would tell you flat that she will pray it again next year.

But there is a way she has started thinking about the rest of the year and it worries her.

She has begun to think of the Tuesdays in between as the waiting. That is the actual word in her head. She goes on Tuesdays, mostly, and there are fifteen people and somebody brings the bad coffee and they pray for the same four families and somebody reads something and it is fine.

And she has been sitting in that room for nine years calling it the gap.

In March she was in there on a Tuesday and a woman she has known for eleven years said something to her at the end, quite ordinary, about her mother.

And she was in the car afterwards before she understood that it was the third or fourth most important thing anybody had said to her in a decade, and that it had happened in the gap.

Who despises the day of small things

Let me be careful with the prayer first, because I am not going to talk you out of it and it would be wrong to try.

What you saw at twenty-six was real. Your grandmother was not exaggerating. Wanting it is not greed and asking for it every January is not nagging, and there is nothing in this article that says settle for less or that a person who longs for that is immature.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as a consolation prize: the Tuesdays are not the gap between the answers, and Scripture is blunt about that in a way that is almost rude. That is not my kind reading of nine Januaries, it is what stands written in Zechariah, and the same Holy Spirit who inspired that line was in a car with you in March.

Read it, and notice that it is a question rather than a statement, which is how you know somebody has been caught doing it.

Who dares despise the day of small things?Zechariah 4:10

The context is a temple being rebuilt, and the rebuild is unimpressive. Older people who had seen the first one wept when they saw the foundations, because it was so much smaller.

And into that, God does not say the small thing is going to become big. He asks who dares look down on it.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a January: nine years of Tuesdays are not a waiting room, because the written word refuses to let small days be despised and the Spirit of God has been in a room with fifteen people and bad coffee every week of it.

Now let me put the March thing in front of you properly, because you drove home before you saw it and you have not gone back to it since.

A woman you have known eleven years said something to you about your mother, at the end of an ordinary Tuesday, and it was in the top four things anybody has said to you in ten years. What is written refuses to let a small day be despised, and the Holy Spirit does that kind of work in that kind of room.

Where was it going to happen? It could not have happened in another country when you were twenty-six, because she did not know you. It could not happen in January, because January is fifteen minutes of a particular kind of prayer and nobody says that sort of thing then.

It required eleven years of being in the same room on Tuesdays, and it required her to know exactly which sentence, and it required a Tuesday.

That is what the Tuesdays are for. What is written asks who despises the day of small things, and the Holy Spirit does an enormous amount of His work in rooms of fifteen people with bad coffee, and He does not do it anywhere else because there is nowhere else it can be done.

And the guard, so this is not misheard: nobody here is telling you the fire is not coming or that you should stop asking. Ask in January. Ask in July if you want. What is being taken off you is the word gap, not the prayer.