The Day With Nothing In It

The square on the refrigerator calendar is blank, which it has not been in a long while, and she got up at five anyway.

Nothing today. No drive, no waiting room, no paperwork due, nobody to call before noon, nothing to be ready for. She checked twice. She checked the calendar and then she checked her purse for the little card and then she checked the calendar again, and it is blank, and the whole day is hers.

So she made the coffee and stood at the window with it and watched the light come up over the shed. Then she carried the cup to the good chair in the front room, the one nobody sits in, and she sat down in it at about nine o'clock. She lasted eleven minutes.

She could not tell you what happened at minute twelve. Nothing happened. She got up and wiped a counter that was clean, and then she stood in the middle of the kitchen with the dishrag in her hand and did not know where she was going with it.

Her shoulders are up around her ears. They have been for two years. She catches them there at the sink, at the wheel, in church, and she pulls them down and thirty seconds later they are back up. Her jaw aches most mornings and the dentist says it is not her teeth.

Here is what her body knows. For two years there has been something on nearly every day, and the something has usually been the kind you brace for. So it learned. It got up early and got ready and stayed ready, and it did that faithfully, the way a good dog waits at the door. And this morning nobody told it. The calendar is blank and her body has not been informed, and it is standing at the door at nine in the morning, ready, and there is nowhere to go.

That is you, perhaps, on your own empty Saturday, in your own good chair, eleven minutes in. The thing today asks of you is nothing, and nothing is the one thing you cannot seem to do.

The man who talked to his own soul

There is a line in the psalms that a lot of people read past, and it is one of the most useful sentences in the book for a person in your shape.

Return unto thy rest, O my soul; for the LORD hath dealt bountifully with thee.Psalm 116:7

Notice who is talking to whom. He is not praying there. He turns and speaks to his own soul, out loud, like it is a second person in the room who has wandered off and needs calling back. That is a man standing in his own kitchen saying come here to himself, and it is in Scripture, and nobody thought it was strange enough to leave out.

And notice the word return. You cannot return to a place you have never been. Rest is not being handed to him as a new experience. He is calling something back that his soul knew and left, and the calling back is done with words, out loud, on purpose.

You are allowed to call your own soul back, and it is a thing believers have done out loud since the psalms were written. Psalm 116:7 is the sentence that does it, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes words spoken in a front room do more than the sound of them can account for.

Then look at the reason he gives his soul. Not because the trouble is over. Not because the news improved. For the LORD hath dealt bountifully with thee. The ground under the return is what God has already done, in the past tense, which is the only ground that does not move while you are standing on it.

What the waiting did to you

Now I want to say plainly what has happened to you, because I do not think anybody has said it, and being unnamed is half of what makes a thing heavy.

The season did something to you that is separate from the thing you keep waiting on. Two years of getting ready trained a body, and the training took, and now there is a woman in a blank Saturday with her shoulders up around her ears. That is not weakness and it is not ingratitude and it is not a faith problem. It is what happens to a person who has been standing at the door for two years. It happened to you rather than being done by you.

And God heals that. He heals the part of you no machine gets a picture of, the part that learned to brace, and He does it as truly as He does anything.

Here is the thing I will not do with that, and I want to be plain, because this is where a page like this usually goes crooked. I am not offering you inside healing instead of the thing you asked Him for. It is not a swap and it is not a consolation prize and I am not going to hand it to you at the end like a smaller gift so you can be told you got something. What you asked for is still what you asked for. This is additional. Both, at once, and neither one standing in for the other.

God heals, and I do not promise you the result. I say that on every page and I am saying it here, where a promise would go down easiest. What He does with your body is His. And nobody in this front room failed to have enough faith. That sentence is not in the book and it is not true, and it has no business being said over a woman whose jaw hurts from two years of holding on.

You are being made whole in a place no scan reaches, and it is happening alongside what you asked for and not in place of it. Psalm 116:7 gives a soul somewhere to return to, and it is the Holy Spirit doing that work in you, quietly, on a day when nothing at all is scheduled.

And one more thing, said plainly, because I mean it. If the last two years have taken you somewhere darker than tired, if some part of you has caught itself thinking the house would run easier without you in it, tell a living person today and not tomorrow. In the United States, call or text 988 and a person answers. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one human being who can sit in that front room with you tonight. A page cannot sit down in a chair. A person can, and you deserve one.