Fifty-One Weeks of Maintenance

He books it in January, which tells you most of what you need to know.

The thing itself is four days in the autumn. Faisal has been going for nine years. It is a good four days, and he is not naive about why it works: he is away from his own life, he sleeps differently, somebody else does the cooking, and there are two hundred people in a room who all want the same thing at the same time.

None of that makes it false. He would say so plainly. Real things happen to him there, and one of them, six years ago, changed how he treats his brother.

The trouble is what he does with the other fifty-one weeks.

He worked out the word for it in April, in the car park at work, and the word is maintenance.

He keeps the thing running. He goes on Sundays, he reads most mornings, he prays, and all of it is honest and none of it is performance. But there is a quality to it that he can now name, which is that he is not expecting anything from any of it. He is keeping the machine in reasonable condition so that it will start in the autumn.

Fifty-one weeks of servicing. Four days of driving.

He is thirty-six.

And what has slowly happened underneath that, and this is the part that got him in the car park, is that he has stopped bringing hunger to ordinary days. He does not come to Tuesday morning hungry. He comes to it maintaining, which is a completely different posture, and a man who arrives at a table not hungry will not be fed at it no matter what is on it.

He said out loud, to nobody, I have made Him seasonal.

And then sat there for a while, because that is a large sentence and he had not meant to say it.

And you may have your own four days. Yours may be a conference or a retreat or one particular week in the summer, and you may have organized eleven months around it without ever deciding to.

He did not describe an occasion, He described a food

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it since that car park and it was never yours.

You have not been given an annual supply. You never were. Scripture has Jesus naming Himself as a food rather than as an event, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the conditions of a good four days, who does the feeding. Set it down here at this table. It is heavy and it has been in the diary since January.

Now hear what He says, and hear the category He puts Himself in.

A crowd has just been fed on a hillside and has come looking for more of the same, which is a very human thing to do and He does not scold them for it. And He says this.

Then Jesus declared, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty."John 6:35

Bread.

Not a feast. Not a festival. He could have chosen either and both were available in that culture and both would have been true in their way.

He chose the thing people eat on ordinary days without commenting on it. The thing that is on the table on a Tuesday. The thing nobody photographs.

And that is what He is to you, at thirty-six, in a car park in April with eleven months to go. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who serves it, and He has never once been restricted to a season.

Now let me be careful here, because this is where a page like this could do damage.

Nothing here is a comment on how your church does anything, or on what anybody's tradition does with any of it, or on how often. That belongs to your church, it stays exactly where it is, and I am not putting a view about it in your head.

And nothing here says the four days are a crutch or that you should stop going. You should go. Real things happened there and one of them changed how you treat your brother, and God is entirely able to use two hundred people in a room and somebody else doing the cooking.

The point is only that bread is not seasonal, and you have made Him seasonal, and Scripture puts Him in the ordinary category on purpose. His Spirit is the one who has been serving it in fifty-one weeks you were only maintaining.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. You did not decide any of this.

Nobody sits down and resolves to expect nothing from March. It happened the way these things happen, which is that the four days were reliable and the Tuesdays were not, and a sensible man puts his weight where it holds. His Spirit is not disappointed in you and He was in the car park.