I Can Carry a Room, Not a Tuesday

Give Bernadine a room on a Friday night and she will hold it.

She has done it since she was twenty-three. Four hundred people, or eleven people, it does not matter. She reads a room the way other people read a page, and she knows when to slow down and when to be quiet and when somebody at the back has stopped breathing properly, and she will stay until two in the morning with whoever needs staying with, and she will drive home at three with her shoes in the passenger seat, spent and glad.

That is not boasting. That is a gift and she did not manufacture it and she knows it.

Here is the other thing that is true about her, and she has told almost nobody.

There was a Tuesday group.

It ran in the small room at the side, and it was seven women, and it started in the January and it was hers. Not a big thing. A pot of tea, an hour, one chapter, and a lot of not much.

It ran for six weeks.

Not because it failed. It did not fail. Two of those women still ring each other. It ran for six weeks because on the seventh Tuesday Bernadine had had a long day and there was traffic and she sent a message at ten past six, and on the eighth Tuesday nobody expected her, and on the ninth there was no Tuesday group.

That was four years ago. She has done maybe eleven big nights since and every one of them landed.

And in July she was driving home from one of them at half two in the morning, entirely happy, and a sentence arrived in the car and would not leave, and the sentence was: I can carry a room and I cannot carry a Tuesday.

She said it out loud in the car. Then she said it again.

Because she has been treating those two things as one thing, and calling the whole of it ministry, and quietly assuming that if the big nights are landing then the machinery must be fine.

But the big night runs on adrenaline, and adrenaline is honest, and it turns up when you need it and it is genuinely from God.

A Tuesday runs on something else entirely. Nothing turns up on a Tuesday. There is no room to read and no back row and no moment. There is only whether you get in the car at ten past six when there is traffic and you have had a long day.

And she has been failing that specific test for about fifteen years without ever once noticing, because the Fridays kept working.

And you may know this. You may be extraordinary at the big thing and unable to hold an ordinary week, and nobody has ever told you those are two different muscles.

The word for it in the sentence is labor, and labor is a weekday word

Let me take something off you before we go on, because you have carried it since July and it was never yours.

You are not fake because the Tuesdays fall over. You never were. Scripture names the long work with an ordinary weekday word and never once measures anybody by the size of their best night, and it is the Holy Spirit, not adrenaline, who holds a person to something over years. Set that down right here. It is heavy and it has been riding home with you at half two in the morning.

Now hear the sentence, and hear the word it chooses.

Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labour in the Lord is not in vain.1 Corinthians 15:58

Labor.

Not moment. Not anointing. Not night. Labor, which is a word about work that gets done whether or not anybody feels like it, the sort of word you would use about a shift.

And look at the two things it asks for either side of it: stand firm, and let nothing move you. Both of those are about staying in position when there is pressure to leave it. Neither of them is about producing anything.

And you have that in you. Right now, on an ordinary weekday, in traffic, with a long day behind you. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who holds a person in position, and He has never once been restricted to Friday nights.

Now here is the part I want to put carefully, because it is the turn.

There were people who worked forty years on one wrong, and the thing that got it done was not their great nights. There were great nights. There were speeches people still quote.

But the machine underneath was a small group of people who met on the same day, in the same room, for decades. Minutes were taken. Papers were read out. Most of those meetings were dull and several of them were pointless and a few of them were attended by three people in bad weather.

The great nights sat on top of the Tuesdays. Without the Tuesdays, the great nights would have been eleven wonderful evenings and nothing else.

You have not been failing at ministry. You have been superb at one half of it and untrained in the other, and nobody separated them for you.

Scripture calls it labor and says it is not in vain, and the same Spirit who fills a room on a Friday is the one who gets a woman into a car at ten past six on a Tuesday, and He is not less present in the second thing because it is duller.

And I will say the honest half, warmly, because you would want it. The Tuesday group did not close because you were tired that once. It closed because there was nothing underneath it except your enthusiasm, and enthusiasm has a bad week in it eventually and everybody's does.