Six Years of Tuesdays

The radiator in the corner ticks twice and goes quiet, the way it has every Tuesday since October.

It is six forty in the morning, the sleet is coming sideways past the window, and he is in the room the church still calls the choir room, because for eleven years that is what it was. The risers are stacked against the far wall under a bedsheet. His desk is a folding table with a hymnal wedged under one leg, and on it a mug from a men's retreat with coffee he poured at six and has not touched.

He takes a legal pad off the stack and rules a line down the middle with the edge of a Bible, because in nine years he has never once been able to find a ruler in this building.

Left column: what he actually did last week. Right column: what he told other people to do.

The right column takes no thinking at all. He preached on patience Sunday. He told a nineteen year old on Friday afternoon that God is not disappointed in him, and he meant it, and the kid believed him.

The left column takes longer, and it goes the way it always goes. Tuesday of last week, in the kitchen, over a dishwasher that had been loaded wrong. The thing he said to his son about the truck and the tone he said it in. Four days of being polite to his wife instead of being with her, which nobody outside the house could put a finger on and which she can feel from another room.

He writes it small. The handwriting is a kind of hiding.

Then he does the part he would never describe to another living person. He grades it. Not out loud, not in numbers, but he grades it, and he lands where he lands every Tuesday, which is that the man in the left column has not moved appreciably in six years.

Same table. Same pad. Same hour. The pages have gotten more honest and the man in them has not gotten any different. He read the books. He did the fast in January. Outside, the sleet turns to rain, the parking lot lights go off on their timer, and it is still not light.

And you know that table, though yours is not in a church. The pad might be a note on your phone, or the drive to work, or the ten minutes after everybody in the house has gone to sleep. You run the audit, and you have run it for years, and whatever it was supposed to accomplish it has not accomplished, and by now you would know.

The pad was always going to say the same thing

Here is what six years of Tuesdays actually produced. Not a different man. An expert. Nobody alive knows that left column the way he knows it. He could name the month a thing started and the room it started in. That is real knowledge, honestly earned, and it has moved nothing, because studying a wall has never once shifted a wall.

And the tiredness in that room is honest tiredness. Nobody is standing behind that folding table with a clipboard, keeping score of the scorekeeping. Not God, and certainly not me.

But there is a sentence Paul writes to a church he had never visited, and it does something to a man's eyes.

If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.Colossians 3:1-2

Notice the tense before anything else. Not going to be raised. Raised. Past, done, standing, and the Holy Spirit did it without asking permission and without waiting for a better Tuesday to do it on.

You are seated with Christ this morning, in a cold room, over a pad covered in small handwriting. Colossians 3:1 puts that in the same breath as the command, which is the whole architecture of the thing: the seeking comes after the seating and never before it, and it is His Spirit who set you there and His Spirit who holds you there while you are busy grading yourself.

And notice what Paul does not say. Not seek harder. Not seek correctly. Seek where Christ is, because the location is the point. A man can seek beautifully at the wrong wall for six years and end where he started.

The next verse goes further than most of us let it. You have a life hidden with Christ in God, and you did not do the hiding. That is Colossians 3:3, one clause long, dropped and left standing, and it is the Spirit who joined you to Him, so the hiding holds while you sleep, while you fail, and while you sit there writing small.

Setting your mind is not a discipline anybody can fail

Now let me take away the thing you may already be doing with that verse, because I have done it myself and I know how fast it happens.

A man reads set your minds on things that are above, and before the sentence ends he has built a practice out of it. Fifteen minutes. A reading plan. The phone in another room. A new column on the pad, which is the tell, because the pad was the trouble and now the cure is written on it too.

Setting the mind has no floor. No posture to get right, no number of minutes, no state a person has to reach before it counts. A man who is worn through can look up. A woman who has broken every promise she made herself since New Year's can look up. Looking up is the one thing the tiredest person in the building can still do, which is very likely why God chose it.

Nobody ever got warm by concentrating on a fire. They sit where the heat is falling, and somebody says at supper that they have color in their face. They did not do the coloring. They did the sitting.

You have the mind of Christ, and it did not come to you on a Tuesday you performed well. 1 Corinthians 2:16 says it that flatly, and the same chapter names the Spirit of God as the one who searches the deep things and hands them over, so none of this waits on the quality of your attention.

This is also where writing like this normally starts issuing a standard, so let me refuse it in advance. There is no place a person ought to have reached by now, and nobody here will hold up somebody who changed over a weekend as the shape yours has to take. He keeps no schedule over this room, and there is no second legal pad anywhere in heaven with another man's left column ruled down it for yours to be set beside.

Nobody was built to audit himself alone

The audit happens at six forty because the building is empty. It is private on purpose, and that privacy is doing something to him, and to you if you run your own version of it.

A man who preaches every Sunday still needs somebody sitting on the other side of a table from him, and reaching for that is not time off from what God is doing. It is God working the way He usually works, through ordinary people with ordinary training. See a doctor if the tiredness has settled down into the body and stayed there, because a depleted man misreads his own left column every single time. Find a counselor who will take the whole account rather than the one with the edges filed off. Find one friend, and if the pulpit in this building happens to be yours, find somebody who does not sit under it. And if a Tuesday has gone somewhere much darker than discouragement, if the thinking has turned toward the congregation being better served without you in it, dial 988 before the sleet lets up, and get one person to come and take the other chair.

You were never the only one reading that left column, and there has been a second chair at that folding table since the first Tuesday you ruled a line down a page. Psalm 68:6 says God sets the solitary in families, which is a housing arrangement rather than a sentiment, and it is the Spirit of adoption named in Romans 8 who does the placing. A man who preaches to a room full of people is not exempt from being one of them.