It Depends What Kind of Week I Had

Somebody asked Cherelle whether she was sure and she said, without thinking, "It depends what kind of week I had."

She heard it come out of her mouth and laughed, and everybody else laughed, and it went past.

It has not gone past for her.

Because it is exactly and precisely true, and once she had said it out loud she could see the whole machine.

On a good week she is certain. And a good week is a specific and countable thing: she has read most mornings, she has prayed properly at least twice, she was patient with her mother on the phone, she did not say the thing at work she wanted to say. On a Sunday after a week like that she sings and she means it and there is not a doubt anywhere in her.

On a bad week there is nothing.

And a bad week is also specific. Wednesday she lost her temper in a way she is not proud of. Thursday she said something to her sister that she had been saving up and that landed exactly as hard as she wanted it to. She has not opened it since Monday.

By Friday of a week like that, she is not sure of anything. She goes on Sunday because she goes on Sunday, and she sits there feeling like an item on a list somebody is about to review.

She has been on that graph since she was about nineteen. Fifteen years of a line going up and down, and she has always assumed the line was spiritual.

Her friend Nichelle, who is blunt and a nurse and does not do vague, told her to draw it.

Actually draw it. Four weeks. A dot a week, high or low, for how sure she felt. And then write beside each dot what she actually did that week.

Cherelle did it at her kitchen table on a Saturday morning and it took eleven minutes.

The line matches her conduct exactly. Every single point.

And not one point on it corresponds to anything God did.

She sat there with a sheet of paper and a pen and said, out loud, in her own kitchen, "This is not measuring Him at all."

Now let me ask you what moved yours last.

Because if this is you the line moved this week, and you know which day it moved, and you know what you did on that day, and you have never once suspected that the instrument might be pointed the wrong way.

Whose hand

Jesus says something about His own in John 10 and He says it twice in a row, which is not a habit of His.

And I give eternal life to them, and they will never perish; and no one will snatch them out of My hand. My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand.John 10:28 to 29

Look at what is doing the holding.

My hand. And then, in case the first was not enough, the Father's hand. Two hands, named separately, closed on the same person.

And look at what is not mentioned anywhere in either sentence: the grip of the one being held. It is simply not a factor in the picture. Jesus does not say they hold on well. He does not say they are secure as long as they keep hold. The security in that verse is entirely located in whose hands are closed.

No one is able. Not: no one is permitted, or no one would dare. Not able. It is a statement about capacity, and it does not carve out an exception for the person themselves on a Thursday.

So hear this said over you, at a kitchen table with a sheet of paper and a line on it. You are held in two hands and your own grip was never one of the things keeping you there, and fifteen years of a rising and falling line has never once been a reading of God. That is written in Jesus' own words, said twice over so it could not be missed, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the seal on you, and a seal is applied by somebody else and does not come off on a bad Wednesday.

Now let me be careful, because there are two ways to get this wrong and one of them is popular.

I am not telling you the bad week did not matter.

What you said to your sister landed the way you wanted it to and you know it did, and something needs doing about that, and this article is not going to help you avoid it. Sin is real and it does real damage and it grieves the Holy Spirit, and the New Testament says so in exactly those words.

But grieving somebody is not the same as being dropped by them, and you have been treating the two as one thing since you were nineteen.

Here is what your graph is actually measuring.

It measures your conduct. That is all. You built an instrument that takes a reading of your own week and puts the number in a box labeled God, and then you read the number back out as though He had written it.

And here is the cruelty in it, which is why I want it off you: the instrument is at its most confident exactly when you least need it and it fails completely on the weeks you need it most. A woman who has had a good week does not urgently need to be told she is held. A woman who said the thing to her sister on Thursday does. Your system gives her nothing.

That is not humility and it is not conscience. It is a machine that punishes you for needing it.

The word says nothing in all creation is able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, and Paul builds the longest list he can before he says it, and puts things on the list far worse than a Wednesday. And the Spirit of God is the one who bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, which puts the testimony outside your own performance entirely.

This tradition has said, for four hundred years, that assurance can rise and fall while the standing does not. Those are two different things and it insisted on keeping them apart, because a person who confuses them will spend their whole life on a graph. The feeling moves. The hand does not.