The Cart She Pushed on Monday

It is twenty to ten on a Monday and she is standing in front of the flour, which they have moved.

Yesterday she said something to God. Out loud, at the sink, after the Sunday dinner, with her hands in the water and everyone through in the other room shouting at the television. Eight words, maybe nine. She had not said anything like it in a very long time, and she meant it, and she went upstairs afterward and sat on the end of the bed for a while and then got on with the evening.

It was real. She is not confused about that.

And now it is Monday, and here is the flour, two shelves down from where the flour has always been.

She has the list on the back of an envelope because she has always had the list on the back of an envelope. Chicken, four large. Rice. Onions. The big bag of carrots for Wednesday, because Wednesday is the community lunch and there are twenty-eight coming, and she has done that lunch for years and will do it this week.

The cart has the wheel. Of course it does. It pulls left the whole length of the store and she corrects it without thinking, the way she has corrected it a hundred times.

At the counter the woman says, "The usual?" and she says, "The usual," and they both laugh at nothing, and it is exactly the same as every Monday she has ever had.

And somewhere between the counter and the checkout she notices what she has been doing all morning, which is waiting. Waiting for something to be different. The light through the front windows is not different. Her back is not different. The list is the same list in the same handwriting.

She loads the trunk in the parking lot and she has one thought and she does not like it: maybe it did not take.

You know that Monday. Something happened, and you meant it, and then the morning arrived with nothing in its hands, and you have spent it quietly checking yourself for evidence and coming up short.

The Monday was never going to look different

You are safe here, and let us go slowly, because this is where a real thing gets talked out of a person by an ordinary week. What I have to hand you is written down and older than both of us, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a written thing steady when a morning is not.

You have been treating today as a verdict on yesterday. That is the whole mechanism, and once you see it you can put it down. Something happened at the sink. The next morning arrived carrying the same list, the same cart, the same wheel, and the arithmetic your mind did in the parking lot was that a real thing would have shown up in the details by now.

It would not. It never does. And nothing about this requires a feeling to arrive on any particular schedule.

You are home today, in a week that looks exactly like last week, and the sameness of it has no authority to say otherwise. That is not my reassurance; it is written into how Paul tells a whole church to keep going, and I am going to put the line in front of you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you reading in a parking lot instead of deciding it did not take.

The same way in is the way on

Here is the line, and it is short, and everything is in the word so.

As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him.Colossians 2:6

So. In the same manner. Whatever way you received Him is the way the walking goes, and there is no second mechanism, no upgrade, no different set of terms that kicks in on the Monday.

Think about how the receiving actually went at that sink. You did not produce anything. You had nothing prepared. You said a handful of words with your hands in the water and it was received, and the receiving was not something you generated, it was something you accepted. Paul says walk like that. Keep going the way you came in.

You have already got the whole method, and you got it yesterday, and it is the same method today with a cart in front of you. I am not putting my own idea over you there; that is Colossians 2:6 as it stands, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence written to a church that had never met Paul and lays it on a woman with a bag of carrots. There is no advanced version of this. There is the same open hand, on a Monday.

And that is why the Monday looking the same is not a problem to be solved. The Monday is where the walking happens. A road you can walk on is supposed to be ordinary underfoot.

What God does with an ordinary morning

Let me take you out to the wilderness, because God has done this before and He did it on a schedule.

Bread came down in the night, and the people went out in the morning and gathered it, and this is the part everybody forgets: it happened again the next day. And the next. Every ordinary morning for a very long time, and none of those mornings were dramatic, and every one of them had bread on the ground.

Two things were true about it. It did not keep, so nobody was asked to live off yesterday's gathering. And it did not require an occasion. There was no special day when the manna was better. You went out with a basket into a completely unremarkable morning and it was there.

You are given today's portion today, and yesterday was never meant to feed this morning. That is written into Exodus 16 and it is written into Colossians 2, and the same Spirit who fed a whole people out of an ordinary sunrise is the one steadying you between the counter and the checkout. What you are calling nothing is the shape of provision. It looks like a normal morning because that is what a normal morning is for.

So do not go looking for yesterday in today's aisle. It is not stored there. It was never supposed to be.