One Service, Not Three

Midweek, the auditorium smells of carpet and cold air conditioning and faintly of coffee from a machine two rooms away. The house lights are at half. Somebody has left one row of seats down, row F, and put all the others up, which means a small group met in here yesterday and nobody has been back since.

She is sitting in row F, seat twelve, which is not a seat she has ever sat in. She has been in this room perhaps four thousand times and almost never in it. There is a wrapper under seat nine, a music stand on the platform with nothing on it, and a coil of tape on the floor marking where something used to go.

She used to do three.

Nine, eleven, and half past six. She would arrive at ten past eight with a flask, and she would go home after the evening one and be up on Monday doing the school run for a neighbor. For nineteen years, three, and she never once thought about the number, because you do not count the thing you can do.

Now she does one. The eleven. And Monday is gone. Not tired on Monday, gone: a day horizontal with the curtains half closed, and Tuesday slow after it. Nobody sees either of those days, which is what makes it hard to talk about, because from the outside the only visible fact is that she does one now.

Nobody has said anything. She has checked, and rechecked, and there is nothing to find. People have been kind. Somebody took a rota job off her without making a thing of it, and she was grateful, and she also went home and sat in the car for a while.

It was a question that did it. A young woman with an enormous good heart said, brightly, in a corridor, "Are you only doing the one now?" It was not unkind. It was not even a criticism. There was nothing in it but curiosity, and she has forgotten she said it. It went in like a splinter and it has been in there since March.

Because underneath it is a word she cannot get away from, and the word is fall. Never out loud. Just running in the background whenever she sees a rota with her name on one line where it used to be on three. Something she had for nineteen years and did not earn and never thought about has gone, and there is no funeral for a thing like that and nobody to tell, so it sits in her chest in an empty room with the lights at half.

She has not cried about it. She thinks she might, in here, where nobody is.

You know that room, and it may not have a platform in it. It might be that you used to do the whole shop and then cook, or sit up with a friend until two in the morning. You know what it is to have had something and not have it, and to have nowhere to put the loss because it does not look like a loss to anybody watching. I am not going to tell you it comes back and I am not going to ask you to make peace with it. I want to sit in row F with you and show you what Scripture actually says is happening in an empty auditorium.

Paul says the outer man is wasting, and he says it as a fact

There is a verse people quote at tired believers with a brightness that does not belong to it. Read it slowly and notice what it does not say.

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.2 Corinthians 4:16

He does not say the outer self is being restored. He does not say it is temporary, or your fault, or that a better arranged life would hold it. He states it flatly, in a letter written by a man who had been beaten with rods and shipwrecked and was, by his own account, worn through: the outer is wasting.

That is not a defeat in Paul's sentence. It is an accounting entry. Two accounts run in a human being, at different rates and in different directions, and confusing them is the whole trouble.

Which means the thing that has gone was on the outer account. Nineteen years of three services was capacity, and capacity is real, and capacity is not the ledger God is reading you from.

You are not in decline, whatever the rota says. That is the written word in 2 Corinthians 4:16, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a first century accounting entry and makes it legible to a woman in row F with a splinter in her from March. One account is going down. The other is not, and it is the one you are.

And let me make room for something before I go on, because writing like this rushes past it. The thing that has gone was good. Not vanity, not overreach: a strength you were given and used for nineteen years and never once bragged about. You are permitted to grieve it, and the grief is not a lack of faith in you. Scripture never once asks a person to pretend a loss is not a loss, and the Holy Spirit is called the Comforter, which is a title that only makes sense if there is something real to comfort. Nobody in Heaven is embarrassed by you crying in an empty auditorium about three services.

Day by day is a rate, not a promise about tomorrow

Look at the second half, because Paul chose the tempo deliberately.

The inner self is being renewed day by day. Not stockpiled. Not built up into a reserve you carry into the week. Renewed daily, at the rate of one day at a time, which is exactly the rate at which the outer thing is going.

So the arrangement is not that God tops up your stamina to get you back to three. It is that on the day you do the one, a renewal is happening in you that has nothing to do with the number, at the same speed it ran when you were doing three, and it has not slowed by a fraction since March.

You have a renewal running in you today that the rota has never once measured. It is written that the inner self is renewed day by day, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the renewing, quietly, in a person on a Monday with the curtains half closed and nothing at all to show for the day.

Now the word. The one running in the background. Fall.

Let me take it out and look at it in the light, because it has been doing damage in the dark. A fall is a moral word. It means something gave way that should have held, and it carries blame, which is exactly why it chose itself. But nothing gave way. A body has a finite number of hours in it and yours has spent nineteen years' worth. That is not a fall, there is no sin in it, and nobody who has ever loved you would use that word about you.

You were never a person who fell, and you are not one now. God's word says the outer wastes while the inner is renewed, and the Holy Spirit is the One who tells a person the truth about herself when a word has been repeating in her chest since March with nobody to answer it. The word is not accurate. It has been evicted from the record it was never on.

I will not tell you the stamina returns. I do not know, and a person who hands you that as comfort has promised you something out of their own pocket. And I will not tell you to accept it either, because that would be me settling a loss in your life that is not mine to settle. What I can tell you is which account it was on, and which one you are.