The Hour in the Waiting Room

The clock above the double doors is the kind with a red second hand, and he has watched it go round eleven times.

There are twelve chairs in this bay, joined together in threes so they cannot be moved apart. There are blinds on the window and the afternoon is coming through them in long warm bands that lie across the floor and across the toes of his shoes. Somebody has left a paper cup on the sill with an inch of tea in it. A woman two rows down is doing a crossword and has not written anything for a while.

He has been here fifty-five minutes. They said an hour, maybe a bit over.

And in those fifty-five minutes he has lived the next six months about nine times.

He has done the version where the news is bad and he has to tell his brother, and he has picked the words, and he has heard his brother go quiet on the phone. He has done the version where it means a lot of appointments and he works out, in the chair, with the second hand going round, how the appointments fit around work, and whether he will have to say something to his manager, and what his manager's face will do. He has done the version where it goes on for years. He has done the version where he is the one who has to be strong for everybody, which is the one he does most often and the one that costs the most, and he has done all of it before anybody has come through the double doors and said a single word to him.

His body is behaving as though all nine of those futures have already happened. His shoulders are up somewhere near his ears. His jaw aches. He is exhausted, genuinely exhausted, at four in the afternoon, sitting perfectly still in a chair, having done nothing.

And nothing has happened yet. That is the strange arithmetic of a waiting room. The only thing that has actually occurred in fifty-five minutes is that a man sat in a chair in a band of afternoon light.

He knows this. He is not a fool. He has told himself twice to stop, in the voice you use on yourself, and both times it worked for about ninety seconds and then he was back in month four, in a conversation with his manager that has not happened and may never.

You have sat in that chair. It may have been a corridor or a car park or the edge of your own bed at two in the morning, but you know what it is to be worn out by a future that has not arrived, while the present hour, the actual one, the one with the blinds and the tea on the sill, passes almost unnoticed.

What the man was actually looking at when he said it

You have seen this line on a mug and a tea towel and a wall in somebody's kitchen, and the poster version has quietly emptied it out. So let me put it back where it was said.

This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.Psalm 118:24

Psalm 118 is not a sunny psalm. It is the song of a man who has come out of a very tight place, and he tells you so a few lines earlier: out of my distress I called on the Lord; the Lord answered me and set me free. The word behind distress is one of the tightest in the Hebrew Bible. It means a narrow place, a squeeze, a corridor with the walls in. This is not a man on a good morning. This is a man who has been pressed, standing at the gate, saying, of a specific day, in a specific hour, this one. The Lord made this one.

And notice the size of what he is talking about. Not this year. Not this season of my life. This day. One unit. The one he is standing in.

You are inside a day that was made, and made on purpose, by God. That is the plain claim of Psalm 118:24, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a written line and sets it down under a man in a joined chair with the light coming through the blinds.

The man in the psalm is not being cheerful. He is doing something much sturdier than that. He is looking at the actual day, in a narrow place, and identifying its maker. That is available to you in a waiting room in a way that a general good feeling about life is not, and it is available right now, while nothing is resolved and nobody has come through the doors.

You have this hour handed to you, and it is the only one being handed to you. It is written that the Lord has made this day, and it is His Spirit who does the handing, from a page into an afternoon, without asking you first to feel better about anything.

A day is a made thing, and they arrive one at a time

Look at the verb: the Lord has made this day. Manufactured. Fashioned. The same family of words used for building and forming.

Which means the day you are in is not the leftover space between the things you dread. It is an object. It was worked on. It has a maker who made it and handed it to you the way somebody hands over bread, and it came with what is needed inside it.

Now here is the part that changes the chair you are sitting in. He hands them over one at a time. Not the whole run of them. Not month four. There has never been a moment in your life or anybody else's when God put two days into a person's hands at once, and there is a mercy in that which is easy to miss when you are in a narrow place.

You were given today and nothing else, and that is a kindness and not a shortage. Scripture puts one made day in your hands at a time, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that stop feeling like a limitation and start feeling like the size of a thing you can actually hold.

So look at what is in this hour, since it is the one you have. A chair. Blinds. Warm bands of light on your shoes. A woman with a crossword. Fifty-five minutes gone and some number of minutes left. Not one item of what has exhausted you since you sat down is in this room. The manager's face is not here. Your brother going quiet is not here. Those are pictures, and you have been carrying nine of them, and none of them were given to you.

You are held in the chair you are sitting in, and not in the six months you keep visiting. It is written that this day is the made one, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a person in the day they are actually in rather than in the ones they are rehearsing.

I am not going to talk to you about the six months, not once, not even to reassure you about them. That is not restraint on my part. It is the whole point of what I am here to give you. The moment I widen this out to your future I have taken back the only thing I came with.