The Call She Could Not Make

The list is on the kitchen table where she left it last night, and the handwriting on it is good. That is the part she keeps coming back to. She wrote it at half past nine in the evening in the neat hand she uses when she is being sensible with herself, five things, numbered, the small ones deliberately at the bottom so the day would not start with a cheat.

1. Call the surgery about Mum's appointment.

The phone is face down beside the paper. It has been face down beside the paper since twenty past nine this morning, and it is now twenty to twelve.

Nothing is stopping her. The number is saved. The surgery is open until half twelve and she knows it because she checked, twice. It is a two minute call. She has made a hundred harder calls than this one and made most of them for other people.

She has picked the phone up four times. Once she got as far as the contact and set it down again so gently that it made no sound, which she noticed, and which frightened her a little.

In between she has done things that are not on the list. She wiped the same section of worktop twice. She stood in front of an open cupboard. She read the back of a cereal box, all of it, including the competition that closed in March. There is a mug of tea by her elbow that she made at ten and never drank and that has gone the color of a puddle. Outside, a van reverses with that beeping that goes on far too long.

And underneath all of it, running quietly and steadily since about half past ten, a sentence has been building. It is not "I am tired". It is worse than that and much more precise. It goes: this is who I am now.

Because it is not only the call. The call is just line one. Nothing under it has happened either, and nothing under it is going to happen today, and she knows that already at twenty to twelve, and the knowing is the heaviest thing in the room. Yesterday was mostly like this. So was Thursday. There is a version of her from four years ago who would have made that call at nine oh three without thinking, and she is starting to think the woman at this table is the real one and the other was a phase.

She has not cried. She would tell you there is nothing to cry about. There is a list, and a phone, and a cold mug, and a good clear handwriting that has begun to look like evidence.

You know that table. It might not be a phone call for you. It might be an email, or a door you have to walk through, or a shower, sitting at the top of a list you wrote in a hopeful hour last night. I am not here to get the call made. I am here because it is twenty to twelve and you are still sitting there, and somebody should be with you at this table rather than on the other side of it.

The day was given a size, and it is not the size of your list

Let me start with the verse everybody has heard, because it has been used against people like you for a very long time.

Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.Matthew 6:34

Most people hear a telling off in it. Stop worrying. Pull yourself together. Read that way it lands on a woman at a kitchen table as one more thing she is doing wrong, on a morning already made of things she has not done.

Look at the last clause again, though, because that clause is not a rebuke. It is a measurement. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. Jesus is saying that a day has been given a size, by God, deliberately, and that the size of it is the trouble that actually belongs to it. Not the trouble of the week. Not the five things you wrote at half past nine last night while you were being sensible with yourself. Today's own, and no more.

You have a day that God Himself has already portioned, and it is not the one you wrote down. That is the written word in Matthew 6:34, and the Holy Spirit is the One who hands a person the real size of a morning when the paper on the table is insisting on a different one.

Which means the list on that table is not the measure of the day. It was written by a hopeful woman in an evening, and it is a good list, and it is not the ruler God is using.

You are being measured by nobody this morning. That is what is written into Matthew 6:34 and into the whole passage around it, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a sentence about sparrows and lilies and lays it down on a kitchen table at twenty to twelve as an actual fact rather than an actual scolding. There is no scorecard by the mug. There never was one.

And one more thing, said plainly and left alone. If this has been most mornings for weeks rather than this one morning, please tell your doctor. That is not a spiritual failure and going is not a retreat, and nothing in this message is a reason to manage it by yourself.

The bread was daily on purpose

There is a reason God's people have never once been given a stockpile.

In the wilderness the bread came every morning and could not be kept. Anyone who gathered for two days found it spoiled. It was not a punishment and not a lesson in discipline. It was an arrangement, and the arrangement was that they came to Him daily rather than to a cupboard weekly. When Jesus taught His friends to pray He kept it: give us this day our daily bread. Not this month's. This day's.

So the strength for today was never designed to be in you at half past nine last night when you wrote the list. It was designed to be given, this morning, for this morning. And on a morning when there is none, what you are looking at is not a fault in you. It is the ordinary shape of an arrangement where the supply belongs to Him and arrives at the point of need.

You have a Provider who has already sized this day and is not disappointed by it. Scripture says today's trouble is sufficient for today, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a present kindness in a kitchen rather than a line in a sermon. He is not standing over the list. He is at the table.

Now the sentence that has been building since half past ten, because it needs answering and it will not answer itself. This is who I am now. That sentence is not a diagnosis and it is not a verdict, and it does not have the authority it has been claiming since half past ten. It is a conclusion drawn by an exhausted person on a hard morning, in a room where nobody has spoken up for her.

You were never the woman who made the call at nine oh three, and you are not the woman at the table either. It is written that God knows what you need before you ask, and the Holy Spirit is the One who holds a person's actual identity steady while the day tells them otherwise. What you are is His, and that was settled long before four years ago and it has not been revisited since.

I am not going to tell you the capacity is coming back, or when. That is not mine to promise and I will not hand you a timetable dressed as comfort. What I can tell you is what today is not: not evidence, not the start of a life you are stuck in, and not a report the God who portioned it is reading about you.