The Hour Before They Tell Her

The email came at 9:14. Can you come to Meeting Room 2 at eleven? Nothing to worry about. It is now twenty past ten.

She has read it forty times. She has read nothing to worry about so many times that the words have come apart in her hands like wet paper, and she can no longer tell whether they are a kindness or a warning or just what people type.

The staff room clock is one of those with a red second hand that you cannot hear at all until you can hear nothing else. There is a birthday card going round with a pen taped to it and three signatures on it so far. A laminated notice about the dishwasher. A fruit bowl with one apple in it that has been there since Monday.

Across the hall, the door of Meeting Room 2 is shut and the blind is down, which it never is.

She has already been in that meeting eleven times this morning. In her head. In version one she is calm and asks the right question at exactly the right moment. In version four she cries in the first thirty seconds and despises herself for it. In version seven she is dignified and says "I understand" in a voice she has never used in her life. In version nine there is a folder on the table, and she has seen that folder so clearly by now that she could tell you the color of it.

And the strange part, the part she would not say out loud, is that the versions are more exhausting than eleven o'clock could possibly be. She has been at work for two hours and she has run a marathon.

The kettle clicks off. She has not made the tea. She poured the water in and then stood there with her hand on the counter.

Somebody comes in, takes a teabag, says something about the traffic and something else about the weather, and she answers in whole sentences and smiles at the right point, and the person leaves with no idea at all. She is very good at this. She has been good at it for years, which is a large part of why nobody has ever asked.

Twenty-five past ten. Thirty-five minutes.

And the thought underneath all eleven versions finally comes up where she can see it, and it is not the one she expected. I do not know how I am going to sit in that room. Not what she will say. Not what it will mean. Just the sitting. The thirty-five minutes, then the walking across the hall, then the sitting down.

You know that staff room. Yours might be a hallway outside a consulting room, or a car in a parking lot with the engine off, or the last ten minutes before a phone is supposed to ring. And you know the versions. I am not going to tell you the meeting will be fine, because I do not know that and I will not lie to you. I want to talk to you about the thirty-five minutes.

The Horses Were Faster and They Did Not Help

You are safe here, so let me start with the thing you are doing rather than the thing you are dreading, because the thing you are doing is where the tiredness is coming from.

Judah once stood in almost exactly your morning. Something enormous was coming, the timetable was not theirs, and they did what people do: they went and got speed. Horses from Egypt, the best cavalry money could buy. And the prophet says a strange, exact thing back to them. You said, "No! We will flee upon horses"; therefore you shall flee away; and, "We will ride upon swift steeds"; therefore your pursuers shall be swift (Isaiah 30:16). Read that twice. The speed they chose became the speed of the thing chasing them.

That is what eleven versions do. Every rehearsal is a horse. Each one is bought to get out ahead of eleven o'clock, and each one arrives carrying eleven o'clock into twenty-five past ten with it, which is why you have already sat in that room eleven times and it is not even half past.

And in the middle of that, this is what He said instead.

In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.Isaiah 30:15

You are held in these thirty-five minutes, and the holding is not waiting for you to be calm first. That is not my reassurance; it is what is written in Isaiah 30:15, where strength and quietness are named as the same thing, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes a line spoken over a frightened nation land in a staff room with a fruit bowl in it. Your hands can shake and the sentence stays true. It was never a sentence about your composure.

Let me be plain about the word quietness, because you will hear it as a demand and it is not one. It does not mean serene. It is not the instruction to feel less. It is the opposite of frantic motion, and it is the opposite of the horses. It describes where the strength is coming from, not what your face is supposed to be doing while it comes.

You have strength available for this hour that is not made out of composure and never was. His word puts quietness and trust in the place where you have been putting rehearsal, and it is the Holy Spirit and not your performance who supplies it, at twenty past ten, with the kettle clicked off and the tea not made.

Nothing About Eleven O'Clock Is Being Handed to You

Now I am going to keep this small on purpose, and I want you to hear why, because it will sound like I am withholding something.

I am not going to tell you what happens at eleven. I am not going to tell you what happens after eleven, or what you do if, or what any of it means. I do not know, and a message that reaches past the next hour to hand you the year has quietly taken back the only thing it came with. What I have for you is thirty-five minutes. That is not a consolation prize. It is the actual shape of how God supplies people.

Look at how the manna came. It came daily, in the morning, enough for that day, and what was gathered for tomorrow did not keep (Exodus 16). Not because they were being punished for planning. Because the supply was sized to the day, and a day was all anyone was ever asked to stand in. Centuries later Jeremiah's grief says the same thing from the other side: His mercies are new every morning (Lamentations 3:23). New every morning. Not stockpiled.

You have this hour, and you have it fully. It is written that His mercies are new every morning and that the manna came a day at a time, and the Holy Spirit is the One who brings that supply into a specific twenty-five past ten rather than leaving it a principle in a book. Eleven o'clock has its own supply and it is not yours yet, in the same way that Thursday's bread was not in Tuesday's basket.

And here is the part that undoes the whole rehearsal.

You are carried at twenty-five past ten, and the carrying is not conditional on being ready for eleven. Scripture says in quietness and in trust is your strength, and it is His Spirit who administers that in a body rather than a mood, so being unready at half past does not disqualify you from being held at half past. You do not have to be able to imagine sitting in that room. You have to be in this one, and you are, and so is He.