Dryer Number Nine

Dryer number nine runs hot and takes quarters only, and Tom has learned to bring a roll of them from the bank because the change machine by the door has eaten his last three dollar bills and given nothing back.

The washer at the house died in April. He could have had it fixed by now. He has not, and he knows why he has not, and he does not say it to anybody: Tuesday night at the laundromat gives the hour after supper somewhere to go. There is a woman across the folding table with a boy of about six who is sorting socks into pairs with tremendous seriousness. There is an old fellow by the window reading the same page of the paper he was reading last week. The radio behind the counter is on a country station turned down low enough that you only catch the choruses. The dryers make the sound dryers make, and the room smells like warm cotton and the cheap soap from the dispenser, and there is nothing whatsoever happening.

That is the thing. Nothing is happening. There is no crisis. There is no wedding on Saturday, no bad morning, no bottle in the fridge, no phone call he is dreading. There is only this hour, the one between the supper plates and the bed, which used to have a shape and a sound and a place to sit, and now has forty minutes on dryer number nine. It stopped being a fight a while ago. Now it is just this. Every evening. Tuesday, and then Wednesday, and then Tuesday again, and he is so tired of it being an evening.

The buzzer goes on nine. He opens the door and the heat comes out at his face and he starts pulling towels.

You know that hour. Yours might not be a laundromat. It might be the drive home, or the half hour after the kids go down, or the porch when the light goes. Nobody is asking how you are anymore, because you are fine, and you are fine, and being fine every single evening for the rest of your life has turned out to be its own kind of long road. You are not in danger tonight. You are just here, in the middle, folding, and the middle is very wide.

You are held in the middle of it, and you were never handed the whole road to carry in one evening. Matthew 6:34 says sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, and that is exactly what stands written; the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps the assignment down to the size of one Tuesday at a folding table.

The bread came in the middle of the wilderness

Let me name the pit before I say anything about the way through it, because it is a pit that hides. It is not the dramatic kind. Nobody sends a casserole for it. It is the slow, gray weight of an ordinary evening that has to be got through again, and then again, with no finish line and no applause and no reason anybody would understand if you tried to explain it. It is the ache of the middle. And underneath it, if I am honest about what I hear in it, is a fear that God shows up for emergencies and not for Tuesdays; that He was there in the crisis, and He is somewhere else now that it is only laundry.

Here is what Jesus said about the one day in front of you.

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

Read that as a man at a folding table. Sufficient for the day. Not the year, not the rest of your life, not every Tuesday from here on. Tonight is the only night you are being asked about. Jesus does not hand you the whole road at once and ask you to carry it in the hour after supper. He hands you Tuesday. That is the entire assignment, and it is not because He is being stingy with the view; it is because He knows exactly how heavy the whole road is, and He built the day to be the size a person can hold.

You are held tonight, in this hour, on this Tuesday, and you were never held less in an ordinary week than in an emergency. It is the same holding. Scripture says it in the plainest terms it has, sufficient for the day, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes those words weigh something at dryer number nine instead of staying on a page. He is not somewhere else now that it is only laundry. He is here, in the warm cotton, because ordinary is not a place He leaves.

Now go back further, because Jesus was not saying anything new. When God fed His people in the wilderness, look at how He did it. Not a year's supply. Not a warehouse. Bread on the ground every morning, and the instruction was to gather a day's portion in its day (Exodus 16:4). Anyone who tried to store up for the whole road found it spoiled overnight. The middle of the wilderness, the long undramatic stretch of it, was exactly where the bread came, and it came one day at a time, and it was enough every time, and there was no way to get ahead of it. That was the design. The daily was the point.

You have a day’s portion of grace for this Tuesday, and you were given it before you noticed you needed it. It is written that way in Exodus, and the Holy Spirit is the one who hands it out, fresh, without checking how many Tuesdays you have already got through and without asking how many are left. He does not do counts. He does portions.

I want to be careful here, because I know the voice that says if it were really working, it would feel like more than this. As if grace ought to arrive with a sound. It usually does not. Grace for a Tuesday looks like a Tuesday. It looks like the towels getting folded and the buzzer going on nine and a man driving home with a warm basket on the passenger seat and going to bed. Do not read the ordinariness as absence. Read it as the shape of what you asked for.

And you were never asked to walk this alone, so let me say plainly what a lot of people are afraid to say on a page like this: the friend who texts on Tuesdays, the doctor, the room where people sit in a circle and say true things, the counselor with the box of tissues, all of that is God's kindness with a face on it, and reaching for it is not a failure of faith. Scripture is full of people God fed through other people's hands. His Spirit uses whatever hands are near. Use them.