The Day That Is Never Mine

The transfer goes on the same day every month and he does it standing up, usually in the corridor, usually before he has taken his coat off.

Most of it. Not a portion, not a percentage. Most of what he earns goes to a house in another country where his mother lives with his sister and his sister's two, and where the roof was done last year because of him, and where his mother tells everybody about him in a way that would embarrass him if he heard it.

He would not change one thing about that. He wants that understood before anything else is said. It is not a burden and he did not have it forced on him and he would do it again.

But here is what he noticed in a laundrette in February, of all places, at eleven at night, watching a machine go round.

He has not had a day that was his in four years.

Not a day off. He gets days off. A day that was his, in the sense that what was in it had not already been assigned to somebody before it started. Every hour he works is already spent in a house eight hours away. Every extra shift has a name on it. Even the rest is functional, because a man who does not rest cannot keep sending.

And the moment he thought it, in that laundrette, the next thing that arrived was shame. Because his mother is seventy one and his sister works nights and the two little ones are in school shoes he paid for, and what kind of man sits in a laundrette feeling sorry for himself about that.

So he did what he always does with that thought, which is put it down and pick the washing up.

You know that laundrette. Yours might be caring for somebody, or two jobs, or a household where you are the one everything runs through. And the moment you notice it, the shame arrives so fast that you never get to look at the thing you noticed.

Come and sit down. There is food and the music is going and nobody needs anything from you for the next ten minutes. There is one line in the prayer Jesus taught, and it is about bread, and it has a word in it that I want you to hear.

There is no code, and there is an us

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over the door of this site promises a secret and I am not going to keep a man who works the way you work reading in hope of one.

There is no code. There is nothing in Scripture that multiplies a wage, and nothing here is a technique. And I will say the other thing straight away, because this is where it goes wrong: nothing in this article is telling you to send less, or to look after yourself first, or any of that. That is not what is being said and it is not what you need.

Here is the line, and it is four words long in the middle of the prayer everybody knows.

Give us this day our daily bread.Matthew 6:11

Now, you have prayed that a thousand times. So look at the pronoun, because it is doing something you have never let it do.

Us. Not: give them. Not: give me enough to send. Us.

Jesus put the person praying inside the sentence. There is no version of that prayer in which a man asks for bread for everybody he loves and stands outside the request himself. The us includes the one whose mouth it is coming out of, always, by construction, and He built it that way deliberately for people exactly like you.

And it is this day. Not this month, not this year. Today's bread, for us, which means today's bread for the man in the laundrette as well as for the house eight hours away.

You are inside the prayer, and God has never once received your request for your family as a request that excluded you. That is not a comfort I have arranged over a table. It is written into the shortest line in the Lord's prayer, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a pronoun and lays it on a man watching a machine go round at eleven at night.

You have today, and today is met, and that us was never a slip. Scripture says give us this day, and His Spirit is the one who makes a small word land in a chest that has been outside the sentence for four years.

Now let me say the true thing, because it is not about a day off.

The shame is the part that needs dealing with. You noticed something honest in that laundrette, and within about a second and a half you had disqualified yourself from noticing it, and that reflex is not humility. It is a man who has decided, somewhere, that his own portion is what is left over after everybody else has been counted, and there is no leftover, so there is no portion, so there is no day.

And that is not what the prayer says. The prayer counts you first, in the same breath as everybody else, without any ranking at all.

You are not being selfish for having a portion, and being counted in the us is not the same as taking anything from anybody. Scripture says that the Lord is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup, and a portion is not a leftover, it is a share set out on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a word like portion feel like permission rather than like indulgence.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because four years of this does not shift because friends were warm to you over food. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what carrying on never does. So speak, out loud, right here in this courtyard. You have the standing to speak to a shame that arrives too fast and tell it what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that yours by position rather than by sacrifice, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word much further than a table.