The Substitute Sunday

The drive was fifty minutes each way and it stopped being possible when the second car went.

That is the whole of the reason and it is not spiritual and nobody did anything wrong. There is no bus that works on a Sunday and there was a period of about four months of lifts that everybody was very kind about and that he could not go on accepting.

So now, on a Sunday, at about three, they sit at the kitchen table.

Four of them. His wife, the two children, one of whom is eleven and one of whom is six and does not sit still. There is a cloth on the table because his wife put one there the first week without saying anything about it. They read a bit, they talk about it badly, they pray, and the six year old asks a question about halfway through that is either the best question anybody has asked all week or entirely about a dinosaur.

It has been fourteen months.

Here is the word he uses in his head and has never said out loud, and it has been there since about the third week.

Making do.

Making do until something changes. Making do until the car, or the bus, or the boy is older, or somebody starts something nearer. He has been treating fourteen months of the truest hour in his family's week as a temporary arrangement, and the effect of that is small and constant: he does not prepare for it, he does not look forward to it, and he has never once mentioned it to anybody.

Last Sunday the eleven year old asked, out of nowhere, whether they would still do the table thing if they got another car.

He said: probably, yes.

He has thought about probably every day since.

By a river side, where prayer was wont to be made

Sit down at that table a minute, because there is a sentence in Acts about a place with no building in it, and the whole of what happened in Europe afterwards comes out of that afternoon.

Paul has crossed over into Macedonia. It is a Roman colony, a significant city, and there is no synagogue, which in that world means there were not enough men to constitute one.

So this is what he does.

And on the sabbath we went out of the city by a river side, where prayer was wont to be made; and we sat down, and spake unto the women which resorted thither.Acts 16:13

By a river side, where prayer was wont to be made.

There is no building. There is a riverbank, a habit, and some women who had been going there. And Paul does not treat it as a substitute for a synagogue; he goes there, sits down, and talks to the people who are actually present.

What happens next is Lydia, and then her whole household, and then a church in her house, and then most of the New Testament letters we have.

Hear this at your kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon. You are not making do, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture has the gospel entering a continent at a riverside because there was no building available, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been at your table for fourteen months while you called it temporary.

Now let me name what the word costs, because it is not just a word.

Making do puts a thing in a waiting room. You do not invest in a waiting room. You do not prepare for it, or protect it in the diary, or tell anybody about it, and you do not let yourself love it in case it ends.

Fourteen months of the best hour in that family's week has had none of your investment, and the reason is one phrase you have never said out loud.

Hear this too, and let it change three o'clock. You are not running a stopgap, and Scripture is what says so. What is written puts prayer at a riverside without one word of apology for the absence of a building, and the Spirit of God has never once described a gathering He was present at as an interim measure.

And let me say the other half plainly, because this site will not have it any other way. The place fifty minutes away is not being criticized here and neither is anybody in it. They were kind about the lifts and they meant it. Nothing about a building is a problem and nothing about your table makes it better, and if a car turns up next month and you drive back, that would be good and it would take nothing away from these fourteen months.

Both of those are true at once, and the eleven year old asked the better question.