Glue Sticks and Name Tags

Wednesday, five forty, the annex behind the sanctuary, which is the room with the mismatched chairs and the heater that only works if somebody hits it.

Tanya sets up alone, because she likes the twenty minutes and because the two teenagers who help arrive at ten past six regardless of what has been agreed.

Thirty two chairs in a horseshoe. The shoebox of glue sticks, of which eleven are dried out and she keeps meaning to throw them away and does not. Paper plates. The good scissors and the terrible scissors. Juice, which is the actual reason several of them come, and she has made her peace with that.

Then the name tags. She writes them out at the folding table with a marker that is going.

She writes thirty two names from memory. Every one, including Kayden who comes every third week, and the Ferreira twins, and the little one whose grandmother brings her and whose name almost nobody in the building spells right.

Tanya has done a hundred and forty one Wednesdays.

And somewhere in Wednesday number fifty or sixty, a light in her went out. Not a crisis. No argument with God, no scandal, nothing she could point at. It just went quiet, the way a radio in another room goes quiet, and she did not notice for a while, and then she noticed, and then she waited for it to come back before she said anything to anybody.

That was two years ago. She has told no one. She has said the words to the children every Wednesday since, and she has meant them, and she has felt nothing at all while saying them, and she has quietly assumed that this makes her a fraud with a shoebox.

At six o'clock they start coming in. Nadia, who is seven, gets to the table before her coat is off and hands over a piece of paper, folded in four, the way children hand over things.

It is a drawing of a woman putting out chairs.

"That's you," Nadia says. "Doing the chairs."

Not Jesus. Not the story from last week. The chairs.

Tanya says it is wonderful, and it is, and she puts it on the table, and then she has to go and stand in the corridor by the coat hooks for a minute, which she has not had to do in a long time.

You know that corridor. Whatever your Wednesday is, you have kept doing it long after the feeling that used to come with it stopped coming, and you have not said so out loud, because the sentence sounds like a confession when you say it in your head.

You are not somewhere you have to be talked back from, and the quiet is not a verdict on you. Scripture says hold fast, and then it gives the reason, and the reason is that the One who promised is faithful, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been holding you steady in a room you felt nothing in.

Read who the faithfulness in that sentence belongs to

There is a line in Hebrews that people quote as though it were about grit. It is not. Read the whole sentence, both halves, and watch where the weight sits.

Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful.Hebrews 10:23

You are holding on to something that is being held from the other end, and the faithfulness in that sentence is His. That is what Hebrews 10:23 actually says, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a person standing in a stretch where nothing is felt, which is why the reason given is never your grip.

Now look at the first word, because it is doing work. Let us. It is a plural instruction to a plural people. That letter is written to a whole congregation under pressure, some of them thinking about walking away, and the writer keeps saying let us, consider one another, do not stop meeting together. He is talking to a body.

That is what the church is, and it is worth saying in plain words on a page like this one: a people, a company, a congregation. The holding fast is something a body does together, and no part of it is a private arrangement in which one person is measured alone on how they felt this year.

You are inside that body and you are being carried by it, and nobody is scoring your year. The word says let us, in the plural, to a congregation that was struggling, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a whole people holding when several of them have gone quiet.

Dry is not distance

Here is the thing I most want to take off you, and I want to take it off before anything else gets built on top of it.

A dry stretch is not a verdict. It is not evidence of distance and it is not a sin you have committed quietly. Scripture is full of people whose feelings went flat and whose standing did not move an inch: half the psalms are written by somebody asking how long, and the writer of those lines was not on the outside of the covenant while he wrote them. He was inside it, saying so, at volume.

You have a standing that did not change on the Wednesday the feeling went quiet. The word puts the promise on the One who made it and calls Him faithful, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a person inside a thing they cannot currently feel the edges of.

And I am not going to hand you a program. No plan, no regime, nothing to keep up, because a devotional schedule offered as a cure for dryness turns into one more thing to fail at by about the third week, and then the dryness has company.

I am also not going to promise you that the feeling comes back on a particular timetable. I do not know. Nobody honest does. What I know is what the sentence says, which is that He who promised is faithful, and that is a statement about Him and not a forecast about your interior weather.

You are not required to manufacture anything, and nothing here is asking you to work up a feeling you do not have. Scripture never once makes the promise depend on the temperature of the one holding it, and the Holy Spirit is the one at work in a room whether or not there is any heat in it that a person can detect.