The Flat Hours After Church

By ten past one the parking lot at the church is empty, and by half past one Yolanda is home with her shoes off and the whole afternoon standing in front of her like a wall with no handholds.

The morning was good. That is the part nobody warns you about. The morning was genuinely, truly good: the room full, the singing loud enough that she could not hear her own voice in it, somebody's grandmother crying in the second row, a sermon that landed somewhere real. She hugged eleven people. She meant it.

And now it is quarter to two and the apartment is very clean and very quiet, because she cleaned it yesterday for exactly this reason, and the plates from lunch are already washed, and there is a stretch of time between here and Monday that she has been eyeing since Friday.

Everybody else went home to somebody. That is not self pity, it is just arithmetic. The couple in front of her went to his mother's. The family across the aisle went to a birthday. The young ones went for food somewhere loud. And Yolanda came back to a room that is quiet in the specific way a room is quiet when it has just had a lot of noise in it somewhere else.

Three o'clock to six o'clock. Three hours. On a Sunday there is nothing to do in them, nothing that needs doing, nothing anybody is expecting of her, and this is the exact stretch where she used to reach for the thing that made an afternoon shorter.

She is not in crisis. She would like that on the record. She is a woman in a clean apartment on a Sunday afternoon with nothing wrong, and the nothing wrong is what she cannot get her hands around.

You know these hours. Maybe yours are not Sunday. Maybe they are the hours after a shift ends and before you can decently go to bed, or a holiday afternoon, or the stretch after everybody has been fed. The high point of your week has passed and the drop off the back of it is steeper than the climb was, and the drop is where the old thing waits, because the old thing was never really about wanting it. It was about the length of an afternoon.

You are inhabited in the flat hours, and you were not left with only the loud ones. It stands written in Zephaniah 3:17 that the Lord your God in the midst of you is mighty, and midst is a location word: it means the middle of the room, not the doorway of it. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a present tense in a clean apartment at quarter to two and not just a verse that worked well on Sunday morning.

He is in the midst, and He is singing

Let me say the pit out loud first, because it is a pit that dresses itself up as ingratitude and therefore never gets named.

The drop after a good morning is worse than a flat morning. If Sunday had been mediocre, three o'clock would just be three o'clock. But it was good, and the goodness raised the floor, and now the ordinary quiet reads as absence. And then the second thought arrives, the one that does the actual damage: if He was really in that room this morning, why does this room feel like this? That thought has ended more Sundays than any bottle ever did.

Here is what the prophet says, and I want you to notice how physical it is.

The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing.Zephaniah 3:17

Four verbs about God and not one of them is about your performance. He is in the midst. He saves. He rests in His love. He sings. Read that last one slowly, because it is the strangest and the best: the singing on a Sunday morning is not the only singing that happens. There is singing over you when the room is empty and you are not making any noise at all.

You are the room God is in the midst of, and you were that room this morning and you are that room at three. That is what is written in Zephaniah, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it from a prophet's page into an afternoon apartment without losing any of its weight on the way.

Now look at he will rest in his love. Some translations render it that He will be quiet in His love, and that is worth sitting with for a moment. There is a quietness in God that is not distance. A parent in a room with a sleeping child is not absent because they are silent. The quiet of three o'clock is not evidence that the morning was hollow. It may simply be what love sounds like when it has stopped talking.

You have a God who is quiet in His love toward you, and you were never abandoned at the point where the music stopped. Scripture says He will rest in His love, and the Holy Spirit is the one who teaches a person to tell the difference between an empty room and a quiet one.

There is one more thing, and it is the thing that turns the afternoon. Zephaniah is not written to a woman having a nice week. It is written at the end of a book full of ruin, to a people who had every reason to believe God was finished with them, and the sentence lands there. The singing is placed exactly where nobody expects it. Which means the flat hour is not the exception to His presence. It is the address the promise was mailed to.

You are already the one being sung over, and you have that whether or not anybody is in the room to hear it. The written word says He will joy over thee with singing, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a promise spoken over a ruined city fit a Sunday afternoon in a clean apartment exactly.

One plain thing before we go on, and I will say it in every article I write here: the friend who could be called at three, the doctor, the counselor, the group in the church basement on a Tuesday, all of it is God's kindness arriving with hands and a voice. Reaching for it is not a lesser faith. It is one of the main ways He has always kept people.