The Sixth Year of Wednesdays

There is a rota on the fridge and it is in two colors, and neither color has a gap in it.

Wednesday is the pharmacy and the bins. Thursday is the carer who is good and sometimes late. Friday is the phone call from the surgery you have to be awake for. Saturday used to be nothing in particular, and now Saturday is the day you do the things the week did not leave room for.

Six years.

The first year had a shape you recognized. You said the word temporary to each other, and you both meant it, and neither of you was lying. The second year you stopped saying it. Somewhere in the third the two of you stopped making plans that required a Thursday, and by the fourth you had stopped noticing that you had stopped.

She fell asleep on the sofa at nine again last night with the television on. You put the blanket over her and stood there for a second, which is the only second in the whole day that belonged to you, and then you went and did the tablets.

You are not complaining. That is the thing you keep saying, out loud, to yourselves, in a house where nobody has asked you to justify anything.

You love her. That has never once been in question. What is in question, quietly, in the sixth year, is whether the two of you are still in there somewhere under the rota.

Jesus said it first, and He said it to workers

There is a line in Mark that gets read as a nice thought and is actually an instruction.

And he said unto them, Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while: for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat.Mark 6:31

Look at who He says it to. Not to slackers. To the twelve, who have just come back from doing the work He sent them to do, and who are surrounded by people with real needs, and who have not had time to eat.

He does not tell them the needs are not real. The crowd in that passage is genuinely a crowd. He tells them to come apart anyway.

That matters in a house with a rota in two colors, because rest here has stopped feeling permitted. You are not being self-indulgent when you want an evening. I am not offering you my own opinion about your life. Scripture has Jesus Himself putting rest in the mouth of the ones with the most legitimate reason not to take it, Mark 6:31, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land as permission rather than as one more thing you have failed to arrange.

We are not going to explain the six years

I want to say clearly what I am not going to do.

I am not going to tell you what God is teaching you through this. I do not know. Nobody does, and the speed at which people offer that sentence is usually a measure of their own discomfort at watching you.

I am not going to call this a season with a purpose you must accept. I am not going to suggest it is discipline, or refining, or a door for something else. Scripture nowhere hands a tired person an explanation as the price of comfort, Job 2:13, and the Holy Spirit does not require a couple to have understood a thing before He is willing to be in the room with it.

You are not in the middle of an exam. You are in the middle of a Wednesday, in the sixth year, and God is in the house.

That is a smaller claim than an explanation. It is also the one that is actually true, and it is the one that holds weight when you lean on it at nine at night with a blanket in your hand.

What six years does to two people

Here is the thing that has actually happened, and it happened without a decision.

The rota became the relationship. Not because either of you stopped loving the other, but because logistics expand to fill whatever room they are given, and you gave them all of it, because there was nothing else to give them.

You talk now in handovers. Tablets done. She ate half. Carer says Friday instead. That is not a marriage failing, it is a marriage running on the only fuel available, and it is worth naming out loud rather than discovering in the eighth year.

You have not lost each other under the rota. Scripture says a threefold cord is not quickly broken, Ecclesiastes 4:12, and the Holy Spirit is the one holding the third strand while the two of you have both hands full.

The blanket last night was not a chore. That was the marriage. It was the whole marriage, done in four seconds, in the dark, while the television was still on.

The smallest possible amount of coming apart

Jesus took them to a desert place. You cannot go to a desert place. There is no version of this week with a desert place in it, and I am not going to insult you by suggesting a weekend away as though the barrier were imagination.

But come apart has a small end as well as a large one.

Twenty minutes with the kettle and the back door open. A Tuesday where the television goes off and you sit in the same room without the rota being the subject. One phone call to the friend who keeps offering and being told you are fine.

None of that fixes the six years. It is not meant to. It is the desert place at the size the week will actually hold, and Scripture attaches no minimum duration to the instruction, Mark 6:31, and the Holy Spirit is not measuring the twenty minutes against the ones you did not get.

You have permission for this from the mouth of Christ Himself. Scripture puts the instruction in the imperative, Mark 6:31, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it off the page and into a kitchen where the kettle is already on.