The Parents' Race

The rope goes down at about half past nine and by ten the whole field is organized in a way that will be entirely undone by twenty past eleven, and everybody involved knows this and does it anyway.

Bunting. A gazebo for the tea. Six chairs for people who need chairs and about ninety who have brought their own or are sitting on coats. A microphone on a stand that squeaks at exactly one frequency, and a deputy head who has learned to stand a foot to the left of it.

Sack race, egg and spoon, the one with the beanbags that nobody outside a primary school has ever heard of, and then, at about eleven, the announcement.

And now the parents' race.

There is a noise the crowd makes at that. Half groan and half delight. About fourteen adults get up and start taking their shoes off and pretending they are not going to try, and every single one of them is going to try.

She is not one of them.

She never is. And it is not the running, and it is not that she is not sporty, and if you asked her she would say something warm and self deprecating and entirely convincing.

The truth is that she has been waiting eleven years for a clear day.

Not consciously. It is more that somewhere in her a rule got made about which days you can be fully in, and the rule requires the underneath to be quiet, and it has not been quiet since a season a long way back, and so every day since has been treated as a rehearsal for a day that has not arrived.

Sit on the coats with me a minute. Today I am speaking to the one carrying something nobody knows, who took it to God straight and meant every word, and has been waiting for a clear day.

And here is the honest part, before anything else: I am not going to promise you that the underneath goes quiet. This message does not do that. What I will do is show you which day the psalm was actually pointing at.

Which day it points at

There is a line everybody knows and nearly everybody reads as a mood.

This is the day which the LORD hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.Psalm 118:24

This is the day. A demonstrative. It points. It means the one in hand and not another.

And it matters enormously what the rest of that psalm is doing, because it is not a psalm written on a good day. Read it. The writer is surrounded, pressed, shoved so hard he nearly fell. He says all nations compassed him about. He says the Lord chastened him sorely. The whole thing is written from inside a situation that has not resolved.

And in the middle of that, this is the day.

Not the day after it clears. Not the day when the underneath goes quiet. This one, with everything still in it.

You are standing in a day the Lord made, and you were standing in one on every day you were treating as a rehearsal. I am not offering you a brighter attitude. The written word puts a demonstrative in front of the day and puts the whole psalm inside an unresolved situation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it onto a school field on a Wednesday in June.

Hath made, which is a manufacturing word

Now the middle clause, because it is the part that settles a rule made eleven years ago.

Which the LORD hath made.

That is a making word. The day was produced. It did not simply occur, and it is not the leftover of a better one that failed to materialize. Somebody made it, deliberately, with the contents it has.

So the day you are standing on, with the squeaking microphone and the beanbag race and everything running underneath it, is not a substandard version of a day. It is a made thing, made on purpose, and it was made by Someone who knew what would be in it when He made it.

And that changes what a rehearsal is. There is no dress rehearsal in this life for a performance that comes later. There are only made days, one after another, and they are the whole of what is on offer, and they are not second best.

You have a day that was made on purpose and made for you, and you were never waiting for the real one to begin. Scripture uses a manufacturing verb in that line, and it is His Spirit, not a change in conditions, who makes a made day feel like a gift rather than a placeholder.