An Honest Look At Your Calendar

She did it on a Sunday afternoon in February and she has not been able to unsee it.

She had been scrolling back through the calendar looking for the date of a thing, and instead of finding it she started reading, the way you do, and six months went past under her thumb.

Coffee with A, who is helping her with a job application. Dinner with B and C, who are the most interesting people she knows. The book group, all of whom she likes and two of whom she is slightly in awe of. Her sister. Her sister again. A weekend away with the four from university. Two work things that were not really work.

There was not one entry in six months for a person who could not do something for her.

She wants to be fair about this and so do I. Some of those people need her and she gives them a great deal. Her sister is not a transaction. The four from university have held her up through two very bad years.

But she looked at it as a shape rather than as a list, and the shape was a circle, and everybody in it was somebody it made sense to know.

She is thirty one and she was not ashamed, exactly. It was more like the feeling of catching your reflection in a shop window at an angle you have never seen yourself from and thinking: is that how I stand.

She closed the app and did not think about it for two days and then thought about it constantly.

As we have opportunity

Paul writes a line about doing good that has a phrase in it people skip because it sounds like filler.

As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith.Galatians 6:10

Take that on the sofa with the app shut. You are free to do this in the week you have already got. The word says as we have therefore opportunity, and it is the Holy Spirit who opens the doors, which is why no scheme is required of you.

As we have opportunity.

That is not a hedge and it is not a get out. It is a description of how this actually works. Not: make a grand plan. Not: restructure your life. As you have opportunity, which means: in the gaps that already exist, in the week you have already got, with the door that is already open in front of you.

Which is a mercy, because a woman who has just seen the shape of her own calendar is at real risk of trying to fix it with a scheme.

So take this on your sofa, and know it is not my rebuke, it is what is written: you are free to do this small and now, without redesigning anything. His word says as we have opportunity let us do good unto all men, and it is the Holy Spirit who opens the doors and who has been the one making that shape uncomfortable to look at since February.

And hear the other thing plainly. Nobody in your calendar is there wrongly. This is not a call to stop seeing interesting people or to feel bad about a friendship that also happens to be useful. Almost every good friendship in the world is useful in some direction, and God is not squeamish about that.

The point is not that the circle is bad. It is that there is a category of hour outside it that you have not spent in six months and that you were built for.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who was met by God at a meeting he did not want to attend, and who built a timetable out of it, and the striking thing about that timetable is who was in it.

Prisoners. Debtors. Miners. The old. The dying. Fifty years of hours that ran in one direction and came back empty, and he was, by any measure, one of the most connected and influential men of his century, which is to say he had every opportunity to spend his life inside a circle of useful people and he kept walking out of it.

The name that got attached to those people started as a joke about how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the shape it made in his week was a line going outward rather than a circle.