The Same Four Curbs

Twenty-two years of Thursdays and she could do the route with her eyes shut, which is a thing you must never say about driving, so she does not say it.

Out of the yard at twenty past ten. Left at the bollards. The first curb is the one with the dropped section, so the step comes out easily and there is a rail to hold. The second is a bad one, camber all wrong, and she pulls up eight feet further on than the map says because eight feet further on the sidewalk is level. The third has a gate that sticks. The fourth is the one where somebody always comes out with the wrong coat and has to go back in for the right one, and she has learned to arrive four minutes early there and to say nothing about it.

Four pickups. Nine seats. Twenty-two years.

And for two of those years she has felt precisely nothing.

Not doubt. She could sit an examination on what she believes and pass it. Not anger either, and she has looked for anger, because anger would at least be something to work with. Just flat. She prays the way you sign for a parcel. She sings on a Sunday with her mouth working properly and nothing behind her ribs at all.

What frightens her is not the flatness. It is that nobody has noticed. Twenty-two years and she is still the one with the keys, still the one who knows about the camber on the second curb, and every Thursday she climbs up into that seat feeling like a woman who has kept the uniform after the job ended.

If you are doing your own version of the route this week, then you know that the awful part is not the emptiness. It is the suspicion, growing quietly, that the doing has become a costume.

The very little is not the consolation prize

Before anything else, the plain shape of the thing, because this site is about a company and never about a private feeling.

The bride in Scripture is the church. A whole people, gathered out of every century and every language, spoken of as one because Christ committed Himself to the whole of it. It is not a romance and it was never about one person's heart temperature. You are inside that company this morning with the minibus keys in your hand, and the covenant holding it together was made by Him and is kept by Him, and it has survived stretches of church history that would make your two flat years look like nothing at all. His Spirit is what makes that scattered company one thing rather than a crowd.

That matters enormously for what comes next, so hold it while we go on: the thing is not resting on you. Not on your feelings, not on your Thursdays, not on anybody's.

Now, the flatness. I am not going to call it distance, because it is not, and I am not going to call it sin, because it is not that either. Nothing in Scripture treats a dry stretch as a charge against a person, and anyone who has told you otherwise has told you something the word does not say. And I am not going to hand you a routine to fix it. A regime would only give you one more thing to fail at on a Thursday.

What I want to do is look at how Jesus actually measures faithfulness, because it is not measured where most of us have been measuring it.

One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much.Luke 16:10

Read what He puts on the scales. Not fervor. Not the state of anybody's affections. A very little, done. He is naming a quality that shows itself in small ordinary handling, and He says it is the same quality that shows in large things, which means the small thing is not a lesser version of faithfulness. It is faithfulness, at the size the day happened to be.

And there is a mercy hidden in the smallness that I do not want you to walk past. On a day when a person has nothing, a very little is exactly what is available. He did not set the entry level at ardor. If He had, the flat two years would have locked you out. You are inside it still, and two flat years have locked you out of nothing.

So take this now, up in the driver's seat with the engine running. You are faithful today, in the only currency the verse actually names, which is what you do with the small thing in front of you. That is not my encouragement, it is written into the sentence Jesus chose, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes such a line land in somebody who has been grading herself on a completely different scale.

The uniform is not a costume. The eight feet further on at the second curb is faithfulness. Nobody sees it, and it does not need seeing, and I would rather have it done by a woman who feels nothing than promised warmly by somebody who feels a great deal.

Then whose faithfulness is holding the thing up?

Not yours, and this is where the relief actually lives. Hebrews says to hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, and then gives the reason, and the reason is not about the person holding fast. It is because He who promised is faithful. The whole weight sits on His side of the sentence. Paul says the same to Timothy in fewer words: if we are faithless, He remains faithful, because He cannot deny Himself.

You have been treating your dryness as a breach of contract. It is not. You are held by a covenant your mood never signed. The covenant that holds the church was never countersigned by anybody's mood, and the Spirit who was given as the guarantee of it did not lapse in the second flat year.

Which leaves the confession, and notice Hebrews makes it a spoken thing. Hold fast the confession. Something said out loud, held on to with the mouth on a day when nothing else is holding. That is not working yourself up and it does not produce a feeling. It is a person standing on the ground and saying so, and God has always asked for it in exactly this weather. You are standing on ground that holds, and saying so is the whole of what is asked of you. The written word makes the confession a spoken thing, and the Holy Spirit is what gives it weight on a morning with nothing behind your ribs.