Three Days Of Being Told It Is Coming

You have checked it six times tonight and it says the same thing it said at four.

The same arrival window. The same band of color moving across the same map. You have looked at that map so many times in the last three days that you could draw it, and the sixth look tonight told you exactly what the first look told you, which is that it gets here sometime after midnight on Thursday.

And you looked again anyway.

You are not doing anything else this evening. That is the thing you have half noticed and not said. There is a whole evening happening in this house, and you have spent it in a kind of holding pattern, unable to begin anything because starting something feels wrong when a thing is coming.

The dishes are done. Nothing else is.

And every conversation in the last two days has been about it. At the store, at the school gate, on the phone. Everybody has a version, and the versions are worse than the forecast, and each one has added a small amount to whatever is sitting in your chest.

I want to be plain about what this article does not contain.

There is no advice in it. Nothing about what to move, what to buy, what to secure or how to prepare. You know your house and your area and I do not, and a stranger adding one more list to your evening is not what you need at nine o'clock on a Tuesday.

And there is no meaning in it either.

I am not going to suggest this storm is aimed at your town, or that it is being permitted for a purpose, or that there is a message in the timing of it. Weather is weather. It is the one circumstance nobody argues about, and it is coming to everybody on that map, and it did not choose your street.

What this article is about is the three days.

He was asleep on a pillow

There is a scene in a boat in the middle of a storm, and what the disciples say is the honest part.

And he was in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow: and they awake him, and say unto him, Master, carest thou not that we perish? (Mark 4:38, King James Version)

Master, carest thou not that we perish.

That is not a polite question and it was not meant to be. There is real accusation in it. They are in a boat taking on water and the person they trust is asleep in the back, and the thing that comes out of them under pressure is: do you not care.

And notice that scripture keeps it. Nobody edited that line down. It is recorded exactly as it was shouted, and Jesus does not rebuke them for saying it.

That matters tonight, because you have had a version of that thought in the last three days and you did not like yourself for having it.

Not in those words. More like: why now. Or: we cannot take another thing this year. Or a wordless resentment when the forecast updated on Sunday and got worse.

That thought is in the Bible, in the mouths of the men closest to Him, in a boat, at the worst moment. You are not disqualified for having had it.

And then there is the pillow.

Notice that detail, because Mark did not have to include it. He was asleep in the back of the boat, on a pillow, in a storm bad enough that experienced fishermen thought they were finished.

That is not indifference. He is in the same boat, in the same water, in the same danger, and he is at rest inside it.

I am not going to draw the obvious moral about how you should therefore be calm. You cannot decide to be calm and I am not going to hand you a picture of somebody sleeping and ask why you are not managing it.

What is worth having is smaller: rest was possible in a boat that was actually in trouble. Not rest because the trouble was not real. Rest in it.

Rest was possible inside a boat that was genuinely in trouble, and the trouble has never once had to be over first. Mark 4:38 puts him asleep on a pillow in the back of a ship taking on water, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody checking a forecast for the sixth time in an evening.

The waiting is the part that is costing you

Here is the practical half, and it is about where the three days have actually gone.

The storm has not touched you yet and it has already taken three days.

Whatever happens on Thursday will happen in a few hours, and you will deal with it, because you deal with things. That is not the part I am worried about.

What has cost you is Monday, Tuesday and tonight, spent in a state of readiness with nothing to be ready for yet, and that is a state a body cannot hold without paying for it.

And the checking is what keeps it going.

Each look at that map gives you nothing new, and you know it gives you nothing new, and you look anyway, because checking feels like action. It is the only thing available that resembles doing something about it. But it does not reduce the storm by any amount, and it does refresh your alertness every time, so the evening never gets to settle.

You are not preparing. You are rehearsing, and it is possible to rehearse a thing for three days and arrive at it more tired than if you had done nothing at all.

And here is the part underneath, said plainly: you cannot prevent this. Not one thing you do tonight changes whether it arrives or how hard it hits. That sentence sounds like bad news and it is actually the release, because if you cannot prevent it then the vigil is not doing anything, and you are permitted to put it down.

The things that genuinely needed doing, you have done. The rest of this evening is yours.

Not one thing you do tonight changes what the sky does on Thursday, and a vigil has never once made a storm smaller. The written word records the accusation shouted in the boat and does not rebuke it, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody who has been on alert for three days.

Do one ordinary thing tonight

So here is the assignment, and it is deliberately unimportant.

Do one ordinary thing tonight that you would do on a normal evening.

Something you have not done since Sunday because it felt frivolous with a thing coming. Watch the program. Read four pages. Ring your friend about something else entirely. Put music on and cook properly rather than assembling something.

One ordinary thing, done at its normal length.

And do not check the forecast while you do it. Not once during that thing. If it is going to change it will still have changed when you look afterward, and there is no version of the next hour in which knowing sooner helps you.

Now I know exactly what the objection is, because it is the reason you have not done anything since Sunday.

It feels wrong to enjoy an evening with a storm coming. As if being unsettled were a form of readiness, and relaxing were a kind of carelessness that might be punished.

That is not how any of this works. Your unease is not protective. Sitting in the front room being tense does not make the roof hold, and enjoying an hour tonight does not make anything worse. Those two things are completely unconnected, and some part of you has been treating them as though there were a trade.

And this is not about being brave. You do not have to feel any particular way about Thursday. You are simply going to spend one hour of Tuesday living in Tuesday, which is the only day currently available.

You are able to spend an hour of tonight in tonight, and being unsettled has never once been a form of readiness. Mark 4:38 shows rest inside the storm rather than after it, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody doing something ordinary on a Tuesday evening.