Ninety Minutes on a Wednesday

The side room off the hallway has a kettle, a shelf of mismatched mugs, a radiator that knocks, and two chairs that somebody turned to face each other years ago and nobody has turned back.

She gets there at ten. Her husband drops her at the door because the walk from the lot is more than she can spend. She fills the kettle, which she does in two goes because the full jug is too heavy, and she sits down in the chair by the radiator, and she waits to see who comes.

Sometimes nobody comes and she sits for an hour with a cooling mug and goes home. Sometimes one person comes. Twice, in four years, two people have come at the same time and she has had to stretch, and she paid for both of those weeks afterward in a way she does not describe to anybody.

At half past eleven her husband is back at the door. That is not a preference. That is the whole of it. Ninety minutes, once a week, and the rest of the week is a careful arithmetic of how much a body has and what it costs to stand up.

She used to run the youth program. She used to do the meal rotation, the nursery schedule, three Bible studies, and the summer week where they took forty kids to the lake. She could do a fourteen hour Saturday and be at the eight o'clock service, and she was good at it, and she liked being good at it more than she has ever admitted to God.

Eight years took that. Not a decision, not a failure of will, not something she could out-discipline. An illness came and it stayed and it left her with a fixed budget, and the doctors have been clear and she has been sensible, and pacing is not the same word as giving up, whatever the loudest voice in her head says on a bad afternoon.

And here is the sentence she carries into that side room every Wednesday at ten: this does not count.

She never says it out loud. But she does the arithmetic. Ninety minutes against a fourteen hour Saturday. One woman in a chair against forty kids at a lake. She has a ledger she has never shown anybody, and every Wednesday she makes an entry in it, and the entry is always the same, and the entry is nothing.

You have a Wednesday. Maybe it is ninety minutes, maybe it is one phone call you can manage, maybe it is a card you write on a good morning, maybe it is showing up and sitting down and being in the room, and maybe your ledger says the same thing hers does. And you have quietly concluded that whatever you were for, that ship sailed during the years you lost. You are set in the body exactly where God wanted you, and He did the setting, not your stamina. It is written in 1 Corinthians 12:18 that God arranged the members as He chose, and it is the Holy Spirit who distributes to each one individually as He wills, and He has never once distributed on the basis of who could do a fourteen hour Saturday.

Read the word he actually used

Paul is describing a body, and he gets to a place in the argument where he has to deal with the parts nobody would pick. And he does not do what we would do. He does not say they still matter, or they are appreciated, or every little bit helps.

Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary.1 Corinthians 12:22

Necessary. That is the word. Not tolerated, not welcome, not counted anyway. The Greek behind it is the word for what cannot be done without, and Paul stacks the sentence to make sure you cannot read it as politeness. Much more. He is not lowering the bar to let the weak parts in. He is saying the argument runs harder in the other direction than you thought.

And look at the other half: which seem to be more feeble. Seem. He is not disputing what they look like. He is not telling anybody that the weak part is secretly strong, which is the kind of thing people say to be encouraging and which is not true and which you would see through in a second. He grants the appearance completely and then puts the word necessary on the other side of it.

You are one of the parts that verse calls necessary, and Scripture put the word there before you ever counted a minute. It is written in 1 Corinthians 12:22 in exactly those terms, and it is the same Spirit who moved Paul to write it who set you in that side room with two chairs and a kettle you fill in two goes.

What is not the proof

Now I have to be careful with you, because there is a way of preaching this that would do you real harm, and it is the popular way.

The harmful version says: your ninety minutes is secretly enormous, so cheer up, you are useful after all. Do you hear what that does? It leaves the ledger open. It just argues with one entry. And the next time you have a week where you cannot get to the door at all, the ledger will be right there, and by that logic you will have stopped being restored on a Tuesday because your body did what bodies with this do.

So let me say it plainly. Usefulness is not the proof of restoration. If it were, then the eight years you spent in bed would be the proof of the opposite, and I will not have that said in this room and neither would Paul. You were not less His in year three when you could not sit up. Nothing was suspended. Nothing was on hold pending output.

The proof is what is written and who wrote it. That is all it has ever been.

And restored is not replaced. Nobody is handing you back the woman who did the fourteen hour Saturday. That woman is not coming back in the form she was, and I am not going to stand here and predict what your body does from here, because I do not know and the people who tell you they do are guessing in a confident voice. What God restores is the person: your place, your name, your part, your voice, the thing in you that got emptied out somewhere in year four when you stopped believing you were for anything.

You have a part in the body that was never revoked while you were ill, and it did not lapse for non-use. It is written that God arranged the members as He chose and that the feeble ones are necessary, 1 Corinthians 12:18 and 22 sitting a few lines apart, and it is the Holy Spirit who distributes as He wills and who has not changed His mind about you.

And He restores into something, not only out of something. There is work in front of you. Ninety minutes of it, or however much it honestly is on a given week, and the honest amount is the right amount, and no amount of effort is the missing ingredient here.