A Saturday With Nothing In It

On Friday night Cherise looks at Saturday on her phone and there is nothing on it, and she puts the phone face down on the arm of the chair like it said something rude to her.

Nothing on it. Not one entry. No shift, no appointment, no birthday, nobody's child being christened, no reason to be anywhere at all between waking up and going back to bed. Fourteen hours of Saturday with the sides taken off.

Once upon a time Saturday organized itself. It had a start, which was the store on the way back from her mother's, and it had a middle, and it had an end, and the whole thing ran on rails and you did not have to steer it. She is not going back to that and she is not sentimental about it either; she remembers what Sunday used to feel like. But she will tell anybody who asks: the rails are gone and nothing has been laid down in their place, and a day with no rails is a very long day.

She gets up at seven anyway because her body does not know it is Saturday. She cleans a cupboard that did not need it. By half past ten she has done everything there is to do and it is still half past ten.

That is the hour. Not midnight, not the party, not the wedding. Half past ten on a Saturday morning with a clean cupboard and thirteen hours left, and the phone face down, and nobody expecting anything from her at all.

She puts on the radio and butters some bread and stands in the kitchen eating it, and outside somebody in the flats is playing music too loud already, and the whole day is out there like an open field with no path across it.

You know that day. It might not be Saturday. It might be a day off, a holiday, a stretch of leave you asked for and now regret. Everybody else is glad of an empty day and yours has to be got through, and you cannot say that to anybody without it sounding ungrateful.

You have a strong place to stand on an empty day, and you were never asked to manufacture a feeling to stand on instead. Nehemiah says the joy of the Lord is your strength, and it is His joy that is named as the strength, not yours about Him; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a floor under a woman's feet at half past ten on a Saturday morning.

The joy of the Lord is your strength

Let me name this pit properly, because it is a pit that people congratulate you for standing in.

An empty day is the thing everybody says they want. So when yours arrives and it lands on you like weather, you cannot even complain about it, because complaining about a free Saturday sounds like a person who does not know when she is well off. And underneath that is the real ache: you used to know how to fill a day, and the way you knew was not a good way, and now you have neither the bad way nor a good one, and the field is wide open and there is no path across it.

Here is where the verse comes from, and the setting is everything.

Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet, and send portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared: for this day is holy unto our Lord: neither be ye sorry; for the joy of the Lord is your strength.Nehemiah 8:10

The people had just heard the law read out loud for the first time in generations, and they were weeping. Not with delight. With grief, because they were hearing what they had lost and how far off it all was. And the leaders do not tell them to cheer up and they do not tell them to have a better attitude. They give them three instructions: go and eat something good, and send some of it to people who have nothing prepared, and stop being sorry, because the joy of the Lord is your strength.

You are given something to do on the day you cannot feel anything, and you were never told to fix the feeling first. That is what stands written in Nehemiah 8, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a word spoken over a weeping crowd and lays it down on a Saturday morning in a kitchen with radio on.

Look at the order, because it is the opposite of what religion usually suggests. Eat. Then share. Then the joy is named as a strength. The action is placed before the feeling, deliberately, in front of a crowd that was crying, and nobody was scolded for the crying.

You are able to do the first step from exactly where you are standing, and you have permission to do it before you feel one thing about it. Scripture puts the eating and the sending first, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an instruction given to a whole nation work on one woman in a kitchen with a piece of bread and butter in her hand.

And that phrase, the joy of the Lord. It is His joy. Not your enthusiasm about Him, which rises and falls with sleep and weather and how the week went. His. And the word for strength there carries the sense of a stronghold, a fortified place, somewhere you go into rather than something you work up. Joy as a location. That is a completely different proposition from joy as a mood you are failing to produce.

You have a fortified place to walk into on an empty day, and you were never scored on how much joy you could generate at half past ten. The written word calls it a stronghold and calls the joy His, and it is the Holy Spirit who walks a person in through the gate of it on a morning when the feeling is nowhere.

And I will say the plain thing here as it is said in every article on this site: the friend you could call on a Saturday, the doctor, the counselor, the group that meets in the hall behind the church, all of that is God's kindness with a face on it. Reaching for it is not weak faith. He fed a whole city through people carrying portions to each other, and that is still exactly how He works.