Four Tuesdays And Then None

The whiteboard folds. That is one of its selling points, and it is the thing that is making this harder than it needs to be, because folding it is such a small and final movement.

There are still words on it in three colors. Tomorrow. Yesterday. The day after tomorrow. And underneath, in the corner, somebody else's handwriting, a woman called Marta who came all four weeks and wrote her own name and then, next to it, the name of her daughter, because she wanted to be able to write it.

He is going to have to wipe that off before he folds it.

He started the class because he could do the thing that was needed and almost nobody else in that building could. Four languages in his own family, and a hall standing empty on Tuesday evenings, and eleven people at the first session, and it was, honestly, wonderful. Loud, and chaotic, and people staying afterwards.

Week five he was not there because of a shift he could not move. Week six there were four people and no teacher, because the two who had offered to help had both, quite reasonably, run out of the ability to offer.

Nobody came week seven.

The sentence has been with him ever since, and it is not it did not work. It is: four weeks. I got four weeks out of myself.

You know that sentence. It might be a class, or a rota, or something you offered to do for somebody and did three times. There is a small number attached to a good thing you started, and you have been carrying the number around as a description of yourself.

Look at what happened in the four

Before we talk about week five, I want to stand in weeks one to four for a moment, because nothing has taken you back there since it ended.

Eleven people in a hall on a Tuesday. Marta writing her daughter's name. A room where three languages went at once and nobody was embarrassed. Those things happened. They are not canceled by what followed, and they were not, in any case, produced by your organizational ability.

LORD, thou wilt ordain peace for us: for thou also hast wrought all our works in us.Isaiah 26:12

Sit with that second clause, because it is one of the strangest and kindest sentences in the prophets. Thou hast wrought all our works in us. Not: You helped us do our works. Not: You blessed the works we did. He worked them, in us. The prophet looks back over everything his people ever managed for God and hands the whole lot back over, as something God did inside them.

You are a person in whom God has been working His own works, and He was doing that on all four of those Tuesdays whether or not there was a fifth. That is what the written word says over you and not an encouragement I decided to offer a man with a folded whiteboard, and the Holy Spirit who filled that hall on the first night is the evidence that none of it was ever a measure of what you could get out of yourself.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic. If He wrought the works, then four is information about a shift pattern and two volunteers with their own hard lives. It is not information about your character, and it never had the standing to become that.

The number was never the report

Here is the second thing, and it lifts the actual weight.

Somewhere in the weeks after week seven, the number four stopped being a fact about a class and became a fact about you. Four is what he manages. Four is his ceiling. And once a number gets installed like that it starts pricing every future thing you might begin, which is why you have not offered to do anything in that building since.

You have been under the working of God through every week since it ended, and that working never once slowed to match the attendance. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit doing the work in you rather than reviewing a register and deciding what you are worth.

There is something worth saying flat out, because this is exactly where a message like this could turn into a nudge and it will not. Nothing here is telling you to restart the class. Nothing is telling you to find better volunteers or to try a different night. If you never teach anybody anything again you have not stepped one inch outside the work of God, because that work is a person and it does not get scored on weeks completed.

This is where your mouth comes in, because I am not leaving you with a warm idea to fold up with the board. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a person has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Spoken. Not carried around a building for a year. And the thing in the way is not the shift and it is not the two who could not keep helping. It is a sentence: four weeks is what I got out of myself. That has been running unopposed because nobody has ever answered it out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a man with authority holding a board cleaner. Scripture gives you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how much of yourself you put behind them.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than embarrassment, and there are hours when you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.