I Am Waiting For A Nice Saturday

There is a picture in your head and it has been there for about two years.

It is a Saturday. It is bright. Nobody has anything on. Everybody is in a reasonable mood, and you all go out somewhere and it is lovely, and that is the day this family gets its outdoor life back.

And it is a genuinely nice picture. I am not going to be sour about it.

But I would like you to count. Actually count, on your fingers, how many times in the last two years all three of those conditions have been true on the same day.

Most people who count come back with one, or two.

So the plan you have been running your family's entire outdoor life on is an event that occurs about once a year, and cannot be scheduled, and has to be waited for. And in the meantime, every single ordinary evening has been filed under not the right day.

Cold and heat, summer and winter

There is a promise at the end of the flood account that is about the reliability of ordinary weather, and it is worth reading for what it does not offer.

While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease. (Genesis 8:22, King James Version)

Cold and heat. Summer and winter. Day and night.

Read the shape of the promise. It is not a promise of good weather. It is a promise that the whole range of it keeps coming, in pairs, and none of it stops.

That is a much more useful thing than a guarantee of sunshine, and it is also a much less exciting thing, which is probably why nobody builds a Saturday around it.

You are living under a promise about the whole range and not about the nice half, and it was never sunshine that God undertook to provide. Genesis 8:22 lists cold beside heat and winter beside summer as equally certain, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as steadiness rather than as a disappointment.

And notice what is undertaken to continue. Seedtime. The working part. The promise is not that conditions turn out favorable; it is that a time to put something in the ground keeps coming round, which is a promise about opportunity rather than about weather.

You have been promised the seedtime and not the good afternoon, and it was never the pleasant conditions that anything depended on. The written word puts the certainty on the cycle rather than on the quality of any given day, and the Spirit of God is what turns an unremarkable Tuesday into an actual opportunity.

The good day is a coincidence

Now the thing I most want to hand you, and it is a distinction that will do a lot of work.

A plan is something you can execute. A coincidence is something you can only wait for.

The bright free Saturday is a coincidence. Three independent variables happen to line up. Nobody can cause it, nobody can schedule it, and its arrival rate is about once a year no matter what anybody does.

So what has been in place for two years is not a plan at all. The good day is a coincidence and not a plan, and a household waiting for one has stopped deciding anything.

You are not a family who never gets out, and it was never unwillingness that emptied those two years. Genesis 8:22 promises the arriving of the whole range rather than the arriving of the good part, which is exactly why the Spirit of God moves a father onto a weekday evening instead of a Saturday.

And there is a hidden cost worth naming. Because the good day is rare, it has to be special when it comes. So when it does arrive, it carries the weight of two years of waiting, and it has to be a lovely afternoon, and it usually is not, because nothing survives that much expectation.

Pick a bad day on purpose

Here is the practical part, and it is going to sound backwards.

Pick the next weekday evening. Not a Saturday. Not a day off. A Tuesday, after dinner, when everybody is slightly tired and the weather is doing something unremarkable.

You are able to choose a day that cannot disappoint anybody, and it has never once been defeatist to pick an evening with no expectations attached. The passage guarantees the range and not the highlights, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a father settling on a Tuesday.

Twenty minutes. Out and back. Nobody has to enjoy it and nobody has to say anything about it afterward.

The reason a bad day works better is that it carries no freight. A Tuesday evening cannot fail, because nobody was hoping for anything from it, and that is the only condition under which this becomes a thing your household does rather than a thing your household waits for.

And keep the Saturday. When the bright free day comes, go, and enjoy it. Just stop letting it be the whole strategy.

You are able to hold both without one canceling the other, and it was never a choice between an ordinary evening and a good afternoon. Genesis 8:22 keeps the cold and the heat in the same sentence without asking anybody to prefer one, and the Spirit of God is the one who is out on a street on an unremarkable Tuesday.