The Lift She Gives Every Thursday

Twenty past nine, every Thursday, and she has done it for six years.

Round the corner, the second parking space if it is free and the fourth if it is not, up the path, ring twice because he does not hear it the first time, wait, help him with the coat, the twelve minute drive, drop him at the door, park, go in and sit for an hour and forty with a magazine she does not read, drive him home, kettle.

Six years. Roughly three hundred Thursdays.

She likes him. That should be said. It is not a burden and she is not a martyr and if you suggested she stop she would look at you as though you had suggested she stop breathing.

Here is what came at her a few weeks ago, sitting in that waiting room.

Her whole week is errands.

Thursday is him. Monday is her mother's shopping. Wednesday afternoon is the school run for her daughter who works. Friday is whatever has broken.

And she sat there with the magazine on her knees and thought, quite plainly: is a life made of errands actually made of anything.

She has not said that out loud to anybody, because it sounds ungrateful and it sounds like self pity, and it is neither, and there is no version of the sentence that does not sound like both.

If you have sat in a waiting room and thought that, come and stand in the sun a minute. Nobody is going to ask you to do more.

He is not unjust, and that is a strange way to say it

There is a sentence in Hebrews that always stops me because of the odd way the writer chooses to put it.

For God is not unjust so as to overlook your work and the love that you have shown for his name in serving the saints, as you still do.Hebrews 6:10

He does not say God is kind enough to notice. He says God is not unjust. Which means overlooking your work would be an injustice, a wrong, a thing that could not happen without something being broken in the character of God.

That is an enormously strong way to put it, and it is put that way to people who were tired and had begun to wonder whether any of it had registered.

And notice the last three words: as you still do. It is present tense. He is not commending a completed career. He is naming a thing that is going on this Thursday.

You have not been overlooked, and it would take an injustice for that to happen. Hebrews 6:10 puts the noticing inside God's character rather than inside His generosity, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been in that car and that waiting room every week, which means six years of Thursdays are not floating in the air unrecorded.

Errands are what love looks like when it has a diary

Now the second half, and it goes at the sentence you thought in that waiting room.

You have set errands against something you are calling a life, as though a life were made of larger material and yours had been spent on the small stuff.

But look at what the writer of Hebrews actually calls your errands. He calls them the love that you have shown for his name in serving. He does not distinguish between the love and the driving. The driving is the form the love has taken, and the form is not a lesser version of the thing.

Love without a diary is a feeling. Love with a diary is a Thursday.

You are not living a smaller life than the people who have something to point at, and nothing you have done has gone unrecorded. Malachi 3:16 says a book of remembrance was written before the Lord for those who feared Him and thought on His name, and it is the Spirit of God who has been present at every one of those front doors, so the record exists and it was never going to be in a diary of yours.

Now hear the part this site will not break. Nobody is telling you to do more. There is no target here, no suggestion that six years should have been something grander, and no hint that your week needs rearranging. A woman who does four errands a week for four people is not being handed a fifth tonight.

You have already been faithful, in the present tense, in a set of weeks you have been quietly writing off. Luke 16:10 says the one faithful in very little is faithful also in much, and it is the Holy Spirit who has made a very little into the actual substance of four people's lives.

And under all of it: God is the one keeping you while you keep the Thursdays. You have not been holding four households up on your own, and you were never the only reason any of them managed.