It Was Tuesday

The tap water in this flat tastes of metal in the mornings.

You have to run it. Everyone who has ever lived here knows that, and it is written on nothing and told to nobody, and you learn it in the first week: run it for a slow count of ten and it goes cold and clean, and if you do not, you get that thin coin taste at the back of your teeth that stays there for an hour.

Jonah did not run it.

He filled the glass straight off, standing at the sink at ten past six with his forehead nearly on the window, and drank the whole thing without stopping, and the taste came up the back of his tongue like a penny, and he stood there and let it.

It felt like the appropriate thing to be drinking.

He had said it out loud on Saturday night. Not to a room. Not as a speech. He had said it to himself in the car with both hands on the wheel and the engine off, in the specific tone a man uses when he actually means it, and he did mean it. That was not a performance. Something in him had genuinely turned.

And it was Tuesday.

That is what he cannot get past. Not the thing itself. The gap. Saturday to Tuesday, and he could tell you the hour, and the worst part is not shame exactly, it is a kind of quiet embarrassment about ever having believed himself, which is a much colder feeling and much harder to say to anybody.

There is a meeting on Thursday. He is not going to Thursday. Not out of defiance. Out of the arithmetic that runs in a man's head at ten past six, which goes: they will be kind, and I will have to watch them be kind, and I cannot do that this week.

His phone is on the side. There are two messages on it he has not opened, from people who love him, and both of them will be gentle, and that is exactly why they are still unopened.

He is not crying and he is not falling apart. He is standing at a sink drinking metal, on a Tuesday, at ten past six, and the thing sitting on his chest has a very simple shape.

That is that, then.

And here is where I stop talking about Jonah, because you know the taste in your own mouth this morning.

You know what it is to have meant it. That is the part nobody outside understands. They think the meaning it was fake. It was not fake. You have been here, at this window, with this exact weight, and the weight is not really the thing you did. It is that you have run out of ways to trust the man in the car with both hands on the wheel.

Nothing about this morning has moved you

I want to say the most important thing first, in the plainest words I have, because if it arrives late it arrives after you have already decided.

There is nothing on the other side of this that you are further from than you were on Saturday.

Not one thing. Not by an inch.

I know what that sounds like from where you are standing, because from where you are standing the sensible reading of a Tuesday is that the ground has moved. So let me give you a sentence that is older and stronger than the arithmetic in your head, and let it stand on its own. And it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in you rather than merely read well.

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.Romans 8:1

Take that one word at a time, because every word in it is load-bearing.

Now. Not eventually. Not once you have put a run together. Not from Thursday, if Thursday goes well. Now, which means at ten past six on the Tuesday, with the taste still in your mouth. There is no version of that sentence in which you have to get clear of this morning first.

No condemnation. Not reduced. Not suspended pending review. None. There is no small pile of it kept back for mornings like this one and released as required.

For those who are in Christ Jesus. That is where you are. Not where you get to. It is a position, not a performance, and you did not walk out of it in the hours between Saturday and Tuesday, because you did not walk into it by being good in the first place.

I want to be careful here, because this is where somebody usually adds a condition and ruins it. So let me not.

I am not telling you this is your last time. I do not know that and neither do you and it is not the price of anything I am about to say. Nothing in this message is waiting to see whether it turns out to be true. The word now in that verse was not written on condition.

And hear me on this too, because it matters as much as everything above: whatever real help you have got, keep it. The meeting, the program, the counselor, the medication you are on, the person who rings you. None of that is a rival to what God is doing in you, and none of it is a sign of small faith. It is His kindness arriving with a face and a phone number, and He is not asking you to choose between His hands and the hands He sent. The Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into the room you are actually in.