An Ordinary Week Is Not a Disqualification

Somebody at the men's thing asked what God had been doing in his life lately and he said, honestly, that the dishwasher had broken.

It got a laugh, which he had half intended, and then the conversation moved on to a man two chairs down who had a genuine answer involving a conversation with a neighbor and a passage he had been sitting in for two weeks.

He drove home in a good mood and it landed on him at about the second roundabout.

What had he actually done that week. Work, five days. Three loads of laundry. Driven the middle one to swimming twice and the youngest to a birthday party at a trampoline place that cost more than he wants to think about. He had prayed, roughly, on Tuesday, for about ninety seconds, in the car outside the office before going in, and he could not now remember what about.

He is thirty six. He has three children under eleven. He is not in a crisis of faith and he is not sliding anywhere, and if you asked him he would say yes, plainly, he believes it.

What he has is an accumulating suspicion that a life which produces no material is a life that will eventually be found to have been empty. That the men with the neighbor stories are the ones actually doing this, and he is doing something that looks like it from the outside.

He has never said that out loud, partly because it sounds self pitying and partly because he suspects the honest answer is yes.

Sit down. The honest answer is not yes, and there is a verse that settles it in one line.

The whole thing is a gift

Here is the sentence, and the thing to watch is how completely it removes output from the equation.

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.Ephesians 2:8

Not your own doing. Not a result of works. And then the reason it was arranged that way, stated openly: so that nobody can boast, which means the arrangement was designed to make comparison impossible. The Spirit inspired the clause about boasting rather than leaving it to be inferred.

That is what your second roundabout was. A comparison, run against a man two chairs down, on a metric this verse says does not exist.

You are standing on something given rather than produced, and Ephesians 2:8 puts your whole position outside the category of results, and the Spirit inspired the clause about boasting precisely so that nobody would end up doing arithmetic in a car on the way home.

Notice as well the tense. You have been saved. It is reported as a completed thing rather than as an ongoing score, and completed things are not affected by what a week contains.

What a week like yours actually contains

Now the week itself, because it is being read wrong and the misreading is doing the damage.

Three loads of laundry, two runs to swimming, a birthday party, five days of work. Read that as what it is: a man keeping five people fed, clean, transported and safe, over seven days, without dropping any of them.

Scripture is markedly less interested in the spectacular than the men's group format is. It has a great deal to say about faithfulness in small and repeated things, about work done as to the Lord rather than to men, about a father who provides being described in the strongest terms, and about the quiet life being an actual instruction rather than a consolation for people who cannot manage a louder one.

That last one is worth pressing on, because it is the exact inversion of what the room did to you. Aspire to live quietly, mind your own affairs, work with your hands: that is written as a target rather than as a fallback. A man who has spent seven days doing precisely that has not fallen short of the instruction, he has carried it out, and the Spirit is not more present in a neighbor story than in a school run.

None of that produces an answer to what has God been doing in your life lately. That question has a format, and the format rewards a certain kind of week, and it is a good question that has quietly become a scoreboard in rooms full of men who are all slightly frightened of the same thing.

You have not been running empty. Nothing written anywhere makes reportable material the evidence, and the Spirit was in the car outside the office for ninety seconds on Tuesday whether or not you can now remember the subject.

The ninety seconds

Here is the part that will be worth the most to you, and it is about Tuesday.

You dismissed those ninety seconds. You could not remember the content, so you filed it as nothing.

Consider what actually happened. A man with three children and a full day ahead stopped in a parking lot before going into work, on his own, with nobody to impress and nothing to gain, and turned toward God for a minute and a half. That is not the residue of a faith. That is the thing itself, performed under conditions where there is no possible external reward for it.

The reason you cannot remember the content is that it was ordinary, and ordinary is what a real habit looks like from the inside. Nobody remembers most of their meals either.

You are not required to produce a memorable hour. What is written puts your standing on a gift rather than on a performance, and the Spirit does not grade a Tuesday by whether it was quotable at a men's breakfast.