Twenty Minutes In, the Panic

At ten minutes to five the thing Bea was driving to got canceled by a text message with two exclamation points in it, and just like that she had an evening.

Not a free hour. A whole evening, six until whenever, with nothing in it and nobody expecting her. She sat in the parking lot and read the message twice to be sure. Then she did something she has not done in maybe four years, which was to turn right instead of left, because left goes home and home has a basket of laundry in it that talks.

She drove out to the lake and parked at the boat ramp and put the windows down and turned the engine off.

The first twenty minutes were, and she would say this herself, some of the best twenty minutes of her year.

The water had gone the color of a copper pan. There was a heron standing out in the shallows with the absolute patience of something that has never once had a calendar. A kid went by on the road behind her on a bike with a fishing rod across the handlebars, which should not be possible and evidently is. The air coming in the window smelled like water and cut grass and warm asphalt cooling off. She sat with her back against the seat and her hands loose in her lap and she thought, this is what I have been missing.

Twenty-two minutes in, her chest went tight.

There was no reason for it. Nothing changed. The heron was still there. But something came up under her ribs like water under a floorboard, and her hand went to her phone before she had decided anything, and she picked it up and looked at a screen that had nothing on it and put it back down.

Then she started making a list. Nothing that needed listing. She listed it anyway.

Then she thought about driving to the store, and could not name a single thing she needed from the store, and considered going anyway.

Then she thought that she ought to be praying, if she was going to sit here, or reading something worthwhile, or at least calling her mother, so that the evening would be something rather than nothing.

And then she caught herself doing the worst one, which was composing the sentence she would say tomorrow. I went out to the lake last night and just sat. Rehearsing it. Trying it two different ways. Making the evening into a story about the evening so that it would count as having happened.

She put the phone face down on the seat beside her.

The sun went down behind the pines on the far side and the water went from copper to gray to almost nothing, and the heron lifted off at some point when she was not watching, and her chest was still tight, and she stayed.

He emptied their evening on purpose

The disciples came back off a mission trip. They had been out two by two, and they had preached and cast out devils and anointed sick people with oil, and they came back to Jesus and told Him everything they had done and taught, the way you do when it has gone well and you are tired and lit up at the same time.

And the very next thing out of His mouth was not another assignment.

And he said unto them, Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while: for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat.Mark 6:31

Read the reason He gives, because it is not a spiritual one. It is not so that you will be more effective next time. It is not so that you can hear from Me properly. The reason on the page is that so many people were coming and going that these men had not had a chance to sit down and eat.

He noticed they had not eaten. So He emptied their calendar.

You are being handed an evening by the same Christ who invented the empty afternoon, and it was His idea before it was ever a gap in your week. I am not dressing your canceled plan up as providence. Mark 6:31 is written, and it has the Lord Himself taking active men off a good work and putting them somewhere quiet, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line like that off a page in a gospel and lays it over a woman sitting at a boat ramp with her chest going tight.

And notice what He does not do. He does not tell them what to do with the desert place. There is no instruction attached. No agenda, no reading, no exercise, no report afterward.

You have an evening with nothing required in it, and there is no assignment hidden inside it that you are supposed to work out. The written word gives the disciples the rest with no homework attached to it, and the Spirit of God is not sitting in the passenger seat waiting to see whether you use the time correctly.

Why it turns at twenty minutes

Here is what I think is happening at the twenty-two minute mark, and I have watched it in enough people to say it out loud.

For the first twenty minutes, the nothing is a break. It reads as a pause inside a life that is still running. Then something in you notices that nothing is coming next, and that is a different thing entirely, and it is the part nobody warns you about.

A person who has been paid in usefulness their whole life has never had to hold anything else. Being needed is not just what they do, it is the thing they stand on, and when the needing stops for two hours there is a moment where it feels like standing on nothing at all. That is not weakness. That is a floor being tested. Of course the chest goes tight.

And the reflexes that come up are not sins. Reaching for the phone is not a sin. The list is not a sin. Wanting to describe the evening to somebody tomorrow is one of the most human things a person does, because a thing witnessed feels like a thing that happened.

You were never being graded on this evening, and there is no score anywhere for how well you sat still. Scripture puts the Sabbath under a God who rested when nothing was chasing Him, and the Holy Spirit is not standing over an evening with a clipboard.

Now hear the thing this whole page exists for.

Nobody is asking you to do this every week. This is not a practice. I am not handing you a rhythm to maintain, a discipline to build or a habit that will fall over in nine days and become one more thing you failed at. There is no next Tuesday in this. You are being given tonight, this one, and it is complete on its own without a second one behind it. The written word says come apart and rest a while, which is a length of time and not a lifestyle, and the Spirit of God is offering exactly the thing that sentence says and nothing extra.