The Dry Side Of The Room

The baby goes down at half seven and wakes at nine, and by eleven she is asleep again in the cot they moved to the other side of the room, the side where the wall is dry.

That was two weekends ago. They took everything off the bed, walked the frame out to the hall, and stood looking at the patch behind it, which has grown past the edge of the wardrobe and is cold to the back of your hand. It has been reported. It has been reported twice.

Now the room has a dry side and a cold side, and the cot is on the dry one, and every time she looks at that arrangement she feels two things at once and cannot get them to agree.

He is at the kitchen table with the light off, because the light over the cooker is enough and the baby's room shares a wall.

He has run it again. He runs it most nights: what comes in, what goes out, what is standing between the two of them and the end of the month. He knows the answer. He knew it before he sat down, and he sits down anyway.

Then he runs the other one, which is the real one. What happens if the washing machine goes. What happens if the car does not start on Monday. What happens if one of them cannot work for a fortnight. There is nothing set aside. Not a little. None.

He is not a man with a small faith. He prayed with his wife over the cot an hour ago, both of them standing up because there is no room to kneel, and he meant every word of it and would say the same words again now.

And still, at eleven at night, at a kitchen table with the light off, he lives Monday morning through in advance and pays the whole cost of it while nothing whatsoever has happened.

You know that table. That is why you are still reading, and I am not going to tell you the wall is going to dry.

The man who wrote new every morning was sitting in a ruin

There is a line people cross-stitch and hang in bright kitchens, and almost nobody knows where it was written or by whom.

It was written by a man looking at a city that had been burned to the ground. Not a city he feared might burn. One that had already gone: the walls down, the people taken, everything he had loved reduced to the thing you walk past. He writes three chapters of unedited grief before he says this, and he does not take a word of the grief back afterwards.

It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22 and 23

Look at what he does not say. He does not say the city gets rebuilt. He does not say tomorrow is safe or that the worst is behind him, because he had no idea whether it was, and neither do I about your Monday.

What he says is that something arrives daily and it arrived again this morning. So hear it where you are sitting. You have today's mercy in your hands right now, and it came new this morning while you were asleep and not managing anything at all. That is not my encouragement to you, it is what Lamentations 3:23 has been saying over ruins for thousands of years, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it a thing you can lean your weight on tonight rather than a line on a wall in somebody else's kitchen.

Rehearsing it is not the same as being ready for it

Let me say one thing clearly before anything else in this section, because it is the thing that usually gets said wrong to people in your position.

I am not going to tell you to stop planning. Planning is daylight work and it is honest work, and a person with nothing behind them has to think further ahead than a person with plenty, not less far. Your care is not a sin and your fear is not unbelief. Your fear is arithmetic, and the arithmetic is correct.

But what happens at that table at eleven at night is not planning. Planning ends with a decision. What happens at eleven ends with the same picture it started with, run through one more time in the dark, and it does not get you one step nearer Monday. It only makes you live Monday twice.

Here is what Scripture does with that, and notice it does not scold you for it: casting all your care upon him, for he careth for you (1 Peter 5:7). Casting is a throwing word. It is not filing and it is not tidying. It goes from your hands to His, and that is the whole of the mechanism.

You are not carrying tomorrow tonight, and you have never been asked to. The written word puts tomorrow in His keeping and today in yours, and the same Spirit who carried a man through a burned city is the one holding the weight you are about to put down.

Strength comes issued, and it comes for the day it is issued for

Grace is not stockpiled. That is not a poverty of the supply, it is the shape of the arrangement, and every believer alive is on the same terms whatever is or is not behind them.

Paul asked three times for a thing to be taken away and was answered with a word instead: My grace is sufficient for thee. Sufficient is a precise word. It means enough for the load, and it does not mean spare, and Paul was not told the load would be lifted.

So the honest promise is not that nothing goes wrong. Anybody handing you that has never been at your table, and I am not going to hand it to you tonight. The promise is that when the day comes, its strength comes with it, because they are issued together.

You have exactly what today requires, and you have it now. Isaiah 40:29 says He gives power to the faint and to them that have no might He increases strength, and He wrote no exception into that sentence for a couple in a rented flat with a cold wall. The Holy Spirit is the one who brings it down out of the written word and into a kitchen at eleven at night, and He has never once arrived late for a day He Himself issued.

And if that room is making anybody in your house ill, ask somebody for help with it today, and ask without a scrap of shame about it. That is not a small faith. Faith has hands, and using them is the whole reason it has them.