The One With Nothing Going On

Saturday at Miss Verlene's, and the shop is full by half past ten. Four chairs, one hooded dryer that rattles, a mirror wall with twenty years of photographs taped along the edges, and a radio nobody has changed the station on since the shop opened.

Yvette is under the dryer with a magazine she is not reading, because the dryer is where you hear everything. Simone got engaged on Thursday and the ring is going round the room chair by chair. Barb's boy made the honor roll and Barb has the letter in her purse and has produced it twice. Trina closed on the house on Elm and is describing the kitchen in a level of detail that has started to test the room's patience, and everybody is happy for her anyway, because that is what the shop is for.

Then Miss Verlene lifts the hood off Yvette's head and says, over the rattle, what she says every Saturday.

"And what about you, Yvette? What is going on with you?"

And Yvette says what she says every Saturday.

"Oh. Nothing going on with me."

She says it lightly. She has said it so many times it has worn smooth, like a step. Nothing going on with me. She works at the county office, she has worked there fourteen years, she takes her mother to the clinic on Tuesdays and to the market on Fridays, and on Sunday she sits in the fourth row and goes home. There is no ring, no letter, no kitchen. There is not one thing in her whole week that would survive being said out loud in a room where somebody just got engaged.

What Yvette does not count as news, and what nobody in the shop counts as news either, is Kaya.

Kaya is seventeen and sweeps up. She has been sweeping up on Saturdays for a year and two months. She hates Saturdays and she needs the money. And every single week, since the second week, Yvette has said her name.

Not a speech. Just her name. "Morning, Kaya." And then, "How did the biology go?" And then, the following week, "So did the biology come back yet?" Which means that a whole seven days later, this woman with nothing going on remembered that a girl sweeping hair off a tile floor had a biology exam.

Kaya has a mother who is not well and a father in another state, and the number of adults who ask her a question and then remember the answer is exactly one, and she has never told anybody that, because how would you say it.

At noon Yvette pays, tips, tells Simone the ring is beautiful, and goes out into the parking lot. Nothing going on with her. Ask anybody in the shop.

What the council could not account for

There is a scene in Acts where two men are hauled in front of the most educated committee in Jerusalem, and the committee cannot make the arithmetic work. They look at Peter and John and they look at what is coming out of them, and the words the record uses about these two are not flattering ones.

Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men, they marvelled; and they took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus.Acts 4:13

Unlearned. Ignorant. That is the assessment of the committee, and Luke leaves it in. Nobody in that room found hidden depths in Peter. Nobody discovered that John had been underestimated all along. They stayed exactly as ordinary at the end of the hearing as they were at the start, and that is precisely why the last clause lands the way it does. They took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus. The plainness did not get in the way of the conclusion. The plainness was how they got there.

You are the ordinary one, and that has never once been the problem the story had to work around. Acts 4:13 is written down and it says the unremarkable men were the exhibit, not the exception, and the Holy Spirit is not embarrassed by a fourteen year run at a county office. He is the same Spirit who filled a fisherman with nothing on his record.

Hear what I am not saying. I am not telling you that you are secretly remarkable and the salon has failed to notice. That would be the same lie in a kinder voice, because it still says the value is in you and the room just needs better eyesight. It is not in you. It never was. What Acts hands you is better than a compliment: the source is Christ, and the ordinariness is what keeps the source visible.

News and light are not the same thing

Here is the category mistake sitting under the whole Saturday.

News is events. An engagement, a letter, a closing date. Events are countable and they are shareable and they take turns going round the room, and a week with none of them in it produces the sentence nothing going on with me. All of that is fine. Nobody should be ashamed of enjoying the ring.

Light is not an event. Light is a condition. It does not take a turn and it does not wait for something to happen first, which is why the shop has no vocabulary for it and why Yvette's Saturday goes in the column marked nothing.

You have been carrying light through a week that produced no news, and it was working the whole time. Matthew 5:14 put that in writing before anybody had a testimony to report, and the Spirit does not measure a week by what could be announced under a hooded dryer. He measures nothing. He carries.

And notice what actually reached Kaya. Not a talent. Not a gift Yvette has been hiding. A name, said out loud, and a question asked twice. There is no course for that. There is nothing in it a person could be graded on. It is what happens when somebody who has been with Jesus stands in a room for an hour.

You were placed in that shop, on that street, in that job, and the placement was deliberate. Psalm 139:16 says the days were written before one of them came to be, so the plain ones were written too, and His Spirit is not running a rescue operation on your calendar. He is at work inside the week you already have.