The Results Are Due Tomorrow

The kettle has clicked off twice and Delia has not made anything with it.

She is standing in her own kitchen at twenty to twelve with both hands flat on the counter. On the fridge, under a magnet shaped like a lemon, there is a card with a time on it. Nine fifteen. A department on the second floor. A phone number in case you need to change the appointment, which she has read four times and does not need.

Josie is eleven, and Josie is asleep upstairs with one foot out of the covers. She went to bed genuinely fine, because eleven year olds get given the version of things that lets them sleep, and Delia is very good at giving it. Giving it all evening has left Delia nowhere to put her own.

So she has been putting it here, in the kitchen. Twice tonight she has read the results, and that is the part nobody would believe, because the results do not exist. Nobody has spoken them or typed them, and no person alive knows what they say.

The first was the good version, and she let herself have it for four seconds before she took it back off herself like a coat she had not paid for. The second was twenty minutes ago and it was not the good version, and that one she is still standing in. She has worked out who she would call and in what order, and how she would keep her voice level while she told Josie. One of those sentences is quite good.

Knowing it is quite good is the most frightening thing that has happened all night.

She looks at the clock on the stove. Eleven forty-three. Nine and a half hours. She reaches over and switches the kettle on again.

That is you, with both hands flat on the counter. Maybe yours is a card on a fridge, or a text that says they will call in the morning. And maybe you have never told anyone that you do this, that you stand in a kitchen after the house is asleep and hold a private inquest into a thing that has not happened yet.

Before one more word: what happens at that counter is not a failure of faith. It is not weak, not shameful, not evidence about anybody's soul. It is what love does with nine and a half hours and no information. Nobody in heaven is disappointed in you tonight.

What He Said In The Half Second Before Anyone Could Speak

There is a man in Mark's Gospel who spent an evening exactly like this one. His name was Jairus, his daughter was twelve and dying, and he had found Jesus and asked Him to come, and Jesus had said yes and started walking.

Then the walk got interrupted. A woman in the crowd touched Him and He stopped, and He would not be hurried. Notice where the father is standing while that happens. In a crowd, with his daughter at home, every second of that conversation a second he is not getting back. He is running it both ways.

Then the men from his house arrive and say it out loud, in the flat voice people use for that errand. There is no need to trouble the Teacher now. And here is the sentence I want in your hands tonight.

As soon as Jesus heard the word that was spoken, he saith unto the ruler of the synagogue, Be not afraid, only believe.Mark 5:36

As soon as He heard it. The message went past Jesus on its way to Jairus, and He intercepted it and spoke before the fear could finish landing. Look at what He did not say. He did not tell the men they were mistaken, and He handed the father no preview of how the day would end. He spoke to one thing only, and the one thing was the fear in the parent.

You are not waiting tonight for God to notice what is happening to your family. He is already in the room where you are, and already in the room where that call happens, and Mark 5:36 is not history about a first century official, it is the record of how Jesus behaves when a parent is frightened. The Holy Spirit had it put in the book for the hour you are in.

Then there is that second phrase, only believe, which has hurt more frightened parents than almost any line in the Bible. Jairus is not handed a test with a pass mark on it. Look at what the text records him saying in reply. Nothing at all. Jesus keeps walking, the father keeps walking beside Him, and that is everything only believe ever asked.

So hear this plainly, because it is the thing that has been whispering over that counter for two hours. Your fear is not endangering your daughter. It cannot. No verse in Scripture makes a frightened mother the variable, and His word never once hung a child's life on the steadiness of a parent's nerves at midnight. You have been carrying a weight that was never assigned to you, and the Holy Spirit is lifting it off your hands while you read this line.

Notice too that Jesus did not remove the walk. He covered it beside the man, step for step, through the worst part of his life. So the nine and a half hours ahead are not empty. You were given a Companion for this exact stretch of road, and it is written down and has never been withdrawn: He will never leave you nor forsake you. The Holy Spirit is what that sentence feels like from the inside at a quarter to twelve.