Two Days Out of Every Week

The foil goes up at four in the afternoon, which is the wrong time of day for foil.

She tears it off the roll standing on the bed, one hand flat against the window frame, because the light through the curtain has started doing the thing it does. Not brightness exactly. A shimmer along the left edge of everything, a wobble in the wallpaper pattern, and a hole in the middle of her daughter's face when she looked at her in the kitchen ten minutes ago and could not find her nose.

Twenty minutes. That is what the shimmer buys her, and she has learned to spend it well. Text her sister, cancel Thursday. Put the chicken back in the fridge. Water, tablets, curtains, door. Then the foil, taped at all four corners, because blackout curtains are not blackout and the streetlight outside is a small sun that comes on at seven whether she is ready or not.

By six she is on top of the covers with a folded flannel across her eyes and one arm hanging off the side of the bed, because moving it costs something she does not have. The house carries on without her. A cupboard. The tap. A cartoon two rooms away. Somebody drops a fork on the tiles and she feels it in her jaw.

That is Tuesday.

Wednesday is the other day, the one nobody warns you about. Technically fine. Functionally made of wet paper. She does the shopping in a soft gray fog and comes home with everything except the one thing she went out for.

Thursday she is back. Bright, even. Someone at work says you look well, and means it warmly, and she says thanks, and that is the entire conversation, because there is no version of the truth that fits in a corridor between two meetings.

Fifty two weeks in a year. Two days out of most of them. Nobody has ever added that up out loud.

And now I am going to stop calling her she.

Because you know the shimmer. You know the exact minute the light turns hostile and the twenty minute clock starts running. You know your own version of the foil, the towel, the eye mask, the spare pillowcase over the lamp. You know the flat, pleasant voice you use on the phone when you cancel, so nobody hears what is underneath it.

And you know the other thing, the one you never say. Somewhere inside you there is a running total of everything this has taken. Birthdays. Half a holiday. A friendship that quietly thinned out because you canceled three times in a row. The total is enormous and it is completely invisible, because every single time, you have come out of that dark room, put the kettle on, and carried on as though the door had never closed.

Somebody has been counting

I want to start where you actually are, not where a cheerful person would like you to be.

The pain is one problem. Being unwitnessed is a second problem, and on some weeks it is the heavier of the two. Anyone can see a cast. Anyone can see crutches. Nobody can see a head, and so you have spent years being believed at about sixty percent, by people who love you, which is somehow worse than not being believed at all. You have watched a colleague's face do that tiny recalculation when you say the word. You have started saying I get bad headaches, because it is smaller and it costs less to say, and every time you shrink it you are a little more alone inside it.

You are not dramatic. You are not delicate. You are not failing at anything. That is not encouragement I am handing you. The written word said it about you long before the shimmer ever started. His Spirit brings it as far as the left edge of a room where the light has already gone hostile.

And now hear this, because it lands on exactly that spot.

He forgives all your iniquity; He heals all your diseases.Psalm 103:3

Read what is sitting next to what. Forgiving and healing, in the same short breath, out of one heart, in one list. Not two departments. Not two eras. David piled them together because they come from the same place, and that place is the character of God rather than the fashion of a century.

Then look at the word all. That is not a crowd word. It is an inventory word. It means one by one, itemized, named. It means the thing that has no visible edge and no name your friends can hold onto is not filed under miscellaneous in heaven. It is on the list, in the singular, with your name attached to it.

Here is what convinced me, and I am not going to argue you into it. I am just going to show you the story.

There was a woman in a crowd who had been ill for twelve years. Not a dramatic illness. A private, wearying, unmentionable one that had cost her her money, her health and her place in ordinary company. She got to Jesus from behind, on purpose, because behind is where anyone goes after twelve years of explaining, once the explaining is finished. She touched the edge of His coat and started to move away.

And He stopped. In the middle of a crowd pressing in on Him, on the way to an emergency at a dying girl's bedside, He stopped everything and asked who touched Him.

Think about what that cost her for about four seconds, and then think about why He did it. He did not need the information. He was not conducting an enquiry. He stopped the whole street because a woman who had suffered invisibly for twelve years was about to be healed invisibly too, and He would not allow it. He made her tell it. In front of everyone. And then He gave her a name in public: daughter.

That is the argument. Not a lecture, a behavior. If you want to know whether God is indifferent to suffering nobody can see, look at what He did with His attention. He spends it on the person at the back who is trying not to be a nuisance.

You have been trying not to be a nuisance for years. He stopped a whole street for somebody doing exactly that, and it was written down so it could never be mistaken for a mood He happened to be in. His Spirit is the reason it is still true at four in the afternoon, with the tape in your hand and twenty minutes on the clock.

One plain thing, because love is practical. Keep your appointments. Take what you have been prescribed, exactly as you were told, and go back and say so if it is not working. Nobody in heaven marks that down as a failure of trust. God works through good people with skilled hands constantly, and reaching for help is not the opposite of faith. It is what faith does with its hands.