Nobody to Call on a Tuesday

She was not looking for anything. That is the part that got her. She was looking for the number of the man who does the boiler, and she scrolled past about forty names to find it, and somewhere around the letter M she stopped.

Not because of a name. Because of the arithmetic.

Ceri is thirty nine. It is a Tuesday in February and it is twenty past eight. And she went back to the top and went down the whole list properly, on purpose, and asked one question of each name: could I ring this person right now and say I am having a bad night?

Family, four of them, and all four would come, and every one of them would be frightened, and being frightening to the people who love you is its own weight and she is not adding to it tonight.

Then the work ones, who are lovely and are work. Then a whole cluster from the years she does not go back to, who she would not ring and who would not be able to help with this. Then two women from a course she did, who she likes, and who she has never once contacted outside a Thursday.

Nobody. Not one. On a Tuesday at twenty past eight.

And she sat down on the arm of the chair with the phone still lit in her hand, because she had not gone looking for that and it had found her anyway.

You know that scroll. It might be a phone, a Sunday, a hospital form asking who to contact. You were not fishing for self pity. You were doing something ordinary and the arithmetic simply presented itself, and now you are holding it.

You are known all the way down by somebody who was watching the whole scroll, and you were never as unaccounted for as that list makes you feel. David wrote I looked on my right hand and there was no man that would know me, and in the same psalm, thou knewest my path; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes both halves of that true at twenty past eight on a Tuesday in February.

Thou knewest my path

Let me name it honestly, because the usual response to this is to talk somebody out of it and that helps nobody.

You are not exaggerating. The list is the list. And the standard reply, that you are loved and there are people who care about you, is true and it is beside the point, because the question was not whether anybody loves you. The question was whether there is a person you could ring at twenty past eight on a Tuesday and say a true sentence to. Those are different questions and only one of them is answered by a Christmas card.

So here is David, in a cave, having written down the same discovery.

I looked on my right hand, and beheld, but there was no man that would know me: refuge failed me; no man cared for my soul.Psalm 142:4

Three flat statements and not one of them is softened. No man would know me. Refuge failed. No man cared for my soul. This is in the songbook of God's people, and nobody edited it out for being too bleak, and God did not correct him for saying it.

You are allowed to say the true bleak sentence, and you were never required to be fair to everybody before you were allowed to be honest. That is what stands written in Psalm 142, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman on the arm of a chair say a plain thing without immediately taking it back.

Now look at what he says a few lines earlier, because the order is the whole thing.

When my spirit was overwhelmed within me, then thou knewest my path.Psalm 142:3

Then thou knewest my path. At the moment the spirit was overwhelmed, at that exact point, God knew the path. Not found out afterward. Knew, in the middle, while the man was going down and while the list was empty. And notice that it does not say God fixed it. It says He knew it, which is a different and, on a Tuesday night, a more useful claim.

You are being known in the overwhelm rather than after it, and you were never being observed from a distance until you cheered up. Scripture puts thou knewest my path inside the overwhelm, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes being known a real event in a room where the phone is the only light.

And here is what makes that psalm bearable rather than grim: it was written in a cave, and the man in the cave had already been anointed king. His actual position and his current arithmetic were nothing like each other, and the psalm makes no attempt to reconcile them. It just says both.

You are living inside a truth larger than tonight's arithmetic, and you were never obliged to feel it in order for it to be the case. The written word holds a cave and a crown in the same life without apology, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a person's real position steady while a Tuesday says otherwise.

And the plain, practical thing, said the way this site always says it. A list like that does not refill by thinking. It refills by one ordinary act, done for somebody, repeatedly, until a name changes category. And I will say the other thing too: the counselor, the doctor, the helpline that is awake right now, the room where people sit in a circle on a Wednesday and say exactly this out loud, all of it is God's kindness with a face on it. A room like that is the fastest honest route to a name you could ring on a Tuesday, and going to it is not a defeat.