An Ordinary Thursday at Six

The shutter is cold and it sticks at the same place it always sticks, about a third of the way up, and Dalia puts her shoulder into it the way she has since she was fifteen.

Six o'clock. The street is doing what it does at six. The bread man is double parked with his hazards on. The street sweeper is coming up the other side. Two pigeons are having an argument on the awning bar.

She props the door, drags the crates of onions and lemons out onto the stand, straightens the boxes of dates because the front row always slides overnight, and turns the fridge light on.

Yesterday she spoke to God. Properly. Out loud, in the storeroom, standing between the flour and the tinned tomatoes, with the ledger open and forgotten on the shelf. Just a few sentences. It was real. She knows it was real.

And this morning the shutter still sticks a third of the way up.

The same delivery note is wrong in the same way it is wrong every week. Her brother is late again. Her knee hurts on the stairs. There is nothing anywhere, not in the street, not in the shop, not in her chest, that shows anything happened at all.

She stands for a second with her hand on the cold metal, and the thought arrives the way these thoughts always arrive at six in the morning: maybe it did not take.

You are the one with your hand on the shutter, in the first plain morning after the realest thing that has happened to you in a long time.

The morning was never the receipt

Let me put the thing straight down where it can be seen, because this article exists for exactly the hour that has just arrived.

An unchanged Thursday is not evidence. It is not evidence for, and it is not evidence against. It is a Thursday. The shutter sticks because the runner is bent, and it was bent last week, and God did not straighten it overnight to give you a sign, because He does not communicate through shutter runners and He never asked you to read your street for a receipt.

Something real happened in that storeroom. Nothing about a normal morning has any authority to review it.

And notice what your six o'clock brain reached for. Not doubt about God. Doubt about whether the thing counted, which is a very particular kind of ache, and it is the ache of a person who has come home and is now waiting for the house to prove it to them.

You are home this morning, you were home before you got out of bed, and the ordinariness of this day takes nothing off it. It is written in 2 Timothy 2:13 that He abides faithful even when we cannot feel a thing, and the Holy Spirit who met you between the flour and the tinned tomatoes is the same Spirit standing on this sidewalk at six with the crates half out.

He orders the steps and delights in the way

Here is the verse for a Thursday.

The steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD: and he delighteth in his way.Psalm 37:23

Steps. Not leaps, not seasons, not turning points. The unit of measurement in that sentence is a single step, which is the smallest thing a person does, and the psalm says that is what God is ordering.

Then the second half, which almost nobody hears. He delighteth in his way. God is not tolerating the ordinary route while waiting for the interesting part. He delights in the way. The way is the crates and the wrong delivery note and the brother who is late and the knee on the stairs. That is the way, and He likes it, and He is in it.

So the question is not whether anything looks different at six o'clock. The question is whose steps those are as you cross the shop floor with a box of lemons, and Scripture has already answered that plainly.

You are walking ordered steps this morning, and He is delighting in the way while you do it. Psalm 37 says exactly that, and the Holy Spirit is the one making it true in a shop at six rather than in some more impressive location you have never been to.

He did not visit yesterday, He moved in

Now the second thing, because there is a picture in your head that needs replacing.

Half of you is expecting yesterday to have been a visit. Something came near, something happened, and now the ordinary has closed over it and the visitor has gone back to wherever visitors go. That is what the flatness of this morning seems to mean.

If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.John 14:23

An abode is not a visit. It is where somebody lives. Jesus is not describing a moment of nearness that arrives and then withdraws, He is describing the Father and the Son taking up residence in a person, and residence is by definition undramatic. People who live in a house do not knock.

That is why this morning feels like nothing much. Residence feels like nothing much. It feels like a normal Thursday, with somebody in it who was not in it before, or rather who was, and whom you had stopped noticing.

You are not being visited, you are being lived in, and this ordinary morning is what that actually feels like from the inside. John 14 says He makes His abode with us, and the Holy Spirit is the resident, not the guest, in the shop and on the stairs and out at the crates.