Sunday Is the Hardest Day Now

Renee came out of a church in February.

Not out of faith. That is the first thing she says whenever anybody asks, quickly, before they can get the wrong idea. Out of a church. A specific one, with a specific arrangement, that had her at the building four nights a week and all day Sunday and on the phone the rest of the time, and where the word no had come to mean something about her walk with God rather than something about her calendar.

It took her two years to leave and eleven days to become invisible.

Nobody was cruel. That is the strange part and it is the part nobody warns you about. There was no confrontation. People just stopped. The group chat carried on somewhere she was not in it. Two women she had prayed with every week for six years have not called since March, and neither of them is a bad person, and Renee could tell you exactly why they have not called and none of the reasons are malice.

She is forty-four. Her Sundays now look like this: awake at six thirty because eleven years of Sundays does not switch off, and then nothing, until Monday.

She has tried three churches. One was fine. She sat in the back and left during the last song, twice, and has not been back, and cannot tell you why except that it was too much like the shape of a thing.

Here is the moment it caught.

Her daughter, home from college, said on a Sunday in July, "Do you want to do something today?"

And Renee said, "Like what?"

And her daughter said, "I don't know. Anything. You just sit."

And Renee heard that and thought: I do. I just sit. Eleven years of the fullest day of my week and now I sit in a chair until it gets dark.

You know this stretch. You came out of something that had your whole week in it, and you were right to, and now there is a day with a hole in it, and everybody is glad you are out and nobody knows what your Sundays are like.

Through is a preposition with a promise in it

Let me put down what I am not doing tonight, so you can stop bracing.

I am not going to tell you to find a church, and I am not going to tell you not to. That is not something a page can decide for a woman who has just come out of one, and anybody hurrying you toward a decision like that in the same year has not understood what happened to you. I am not going to give you a verdict on anybody who stopped calling, either.

What I will do is slow down on the most famous verse in the Bible, because there is one small word in it doing all the work.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.Psalm 23:4

Through.

Not around. Not over. Not instead of. The shepherd in that psalm does not route the sheep away from the valley. He walks them into it and along it and out the far side, and the entire promise of the verse is located inside the valley rather than on either end of it.

You are inside a promise that was written for the middle of a hard stretch rather than for its ending. Psalm 23:4 puts the comfort in the valley and not past it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into an empty living room on a Sunday afternoon.

And then look at what does the comforting. The rod and the staff. Not a shortcut. Not an explanation. Two pieces of wood, which is to say the ordinary equipment of somebody who is walking beside you and intends to keep walking beside you.

You have not been given a way past this and you have been given somebody in it, and the psalm calls that comfort rather than a consolation prize. It is written that His rod and His staff comfort in the valley, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an ancient presence a present one at four in the afternoon.

An empty day is a real loss

Now let me be careful, because this is where most preaching would go wrong and land on Renee like a weight.

Somebody would tell her this is a season of rest. Somebody else would tell her God is doing a deep work in the quiet. Both of those might even be true, and both of them, said to a woman four months in, function as a request that she stop finding it hard.

I am not doing that. What has happened to her Sundays is a loss. Not a smaller loss because the thing she lost had an arrangement in it. Eleven years of belonging, of being needed at seven on a Wednesday, of six women who knew her, of a room where she had a role, is gone, and it is gone in a way that came with no funeral and no card and nobody saying sorry.

You are grieving a real thing, and no part of Scripture requires a person to rank their losses before they may feel one. Psalm 23 was written by a man who names the valley without apologizing for being in it, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps an honest grief from being renamed as a failure to be thankful.

And here is the thing I most want to take off you, because it is the quiet one. Renee has begun to suspect that the empty Sunday is a comment. That the silence is what a person gets for leaving. That some part of what those people said about her walk with God has turned out, in the end, to be enforced by her calendar.

It is not a comment. An empty day is not a verdict. It is an empty day.

You were never being judged by the shape of your week, and there is no verse anywhere that makes a calendar the measure of a person's standing with God. Romans 8:1 puts no condemnation on those in Christ Jesus with nothing said about attendance, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that a settled matter rather than an argument you have to win.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the Sundays have gone somewhere darker than empty, or if sitting in that chair until it gets dark has become something heavier than boredom, do not carry that alone. Tell somebody this week. Your daughter, a friend who is still calling, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me telling you a thing about churches. That is me refusing to leave you in that chair by yourself.