I Still Wanted It On Tuesday

Sunday was enormous.

Not the water particularly. What was enormous was the drive home, with the windows down and the road going up over the ridge and the whole island doing what it does at that hour, and a feeling in him that he had never had in thirty-one years and could not have described to anybody with a straight face.

He remembers thinking, in those exact words: that is done, then.

Monday was good too. Monday he was up early and useful and pleasant to everybody, including the man at the yard who is not pleasant to anybody.

And then Tuesday, at about half past four in the afternoon, standing at the back of a truck doing something with his hands that he had done a thousand times, the wanting came back and sat down exactly where it had always sat, in exactly the same chair, with its feet up, as though it had never been anywhere.

He is not going to tell you what it is. That is his business and it is not the point of this and it would only make you sort him into a category. It is the ordinary kind of thing that a great many entirely respectable people are quietly managing on a Tuesday afternoon, and the specific shape of it matters far less than what he concluded.

Because what he concluded, standing at the back of that truck, was: nothing happened on Sunday.

That is the whole event. Not a fall. Not a disaster. A man at half past four in the afternoon quietly downgrading the biggest weekend of his life on the evidence of an appetite.

He is thirty-nine now. Eight years. He has never gone back and revised the downgrade.

He still goes. He still gives. He is one of two people that family calls when something goes wrong at night. But there is a private and completely unexamined belief in him that Sunday was mostly weather, and it is unexamined precisely because Tuesday afternoon settled it so fast and so quietly that it never got written down.

Tuesday was not the auditor

Let me go straight to the downgrade, because it happened in about four seconds eight years ago and it has been running your interior life ever since without ever being looked at.

You took an unchanged appetite as evidence about an invisible transaction.

I want you to see the shape of that, because when you see the shape you will notice it does not hold. You were weighing something God does in a man, which nobody has ever been able to see, against something a body does at half past four, which everybody can. It is the same error as before and it is dressed differently each time.

And here is what actually happened on that Sunday, whether or not any appetite agreed with it.

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.Galatians 2:20

That verse is not about how a man feels. It is about who is living in him, and it is written by a man who is describing a fact rather than reporting a mood.

Christ liveth in me. Present tense, and located inside, and not conditional on the behavior of an appetite on any particular afternoon.

You have Christ living in you and He was living in you at half past four on that Tuesday, and that is not my encouragement to a man with a habit, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the downgrade rather than on your understanding of Galatians, which is probably fine.

Now let me say something careful about the wanting, and I am going to stay off the specifics because they are yours.

You expected it to be gone. That expectation did not come from Scripture. It came from a general atmosphere in which people describe things being lifted, and things sometimes are, and God does that, and He does not do it every time or on any schedule anybody can publish.

An appetite that survives a Sunday is not a report on that Sunday. It is a report on a body and a history and a set of grooves worn into a life over thirty-one years.

You are not being told the wanting does not matter. It matters. What is being taken off you is its authority, because it has been sitting as the chief witness in a case it has no knowledge of.

Hear this over it. You were made new and you are living by the faith of the Son of God, and the word says the life you live now, in the flesh, in a body that still wants things, is lived by that faith and not by the absence of appetite. The Spirit of God has been the one keeping you in it for eight years, including the eight years you privately believed nothing happened.

I want to say one more thing, and it is about the two people that family calls at night.

You have been used by God for eight years while believing Sunday was mostly weather. That is worth sitting with, because it is evidence of a kind you did not go looking for. A man who was carrying nothing does not get called at night by people in trouble. Scripture says Christ lives in you, and the Spirit is the one who has been doing the work through a man who had quietly written his own beginning off.