The Regional Visit Is Tuesday

It is on the calendar in your own handwriting.

Tuesday. Nothing else written on that day. You did not need to write anything else because you have not thought about anything else for eleven days.

They are coming. One person, for about three hours, once a year.

You have known this person for four years. They are perfectly pleasant. They have never once been unfair to you and there has never been an outcome from any of these visits that mattered materially in any way you could point to.

And you have not slept properly since the eleventh.

Here is what makes it hard to explain to your wife.

Nothing bad is going to happen. You have told her that and it is true. There is no jeopardy. Nobody is going to shut anything or take anything or say anything sharp.

It is that for three hours on Tuesday, you will not be a man running a building. You will be a performance of a man running a building.

And the performance is exhausting in a way the work never is, and the exhaustion starts eleven days out.

Your youngest asked you on Sunday why you were being weird. That is the word she used.

There is a verse about who is doing the actual assessing that will do something to Tuesday.

God, which trieth our hearts

Paul writes to a church about how he conducted himself and names the audience he was working for.

But as we were allowed of God to be put in trust with the gospel, even so we speak; not as pleasing men, but God, which trieth our hearts. (1 Thessalonians 2:4, King James Version)

Trieth. That is an assaying word. It is what is done to metal to find out what is actually in it.

And notice the object. Our hearts. Not our results, not our presentation, not the state of the back room on a Tuesday in October.

You have already been assayed at a level nobody visiting can reach, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does that trying. 1 Thessalonians 2:4 puts the trying on the heart rather than on the performance, and He has been doing it for four years without an appointment.

Now the phrase before it, because it is the one that touches the eleven days.

Not as pleasing men, but God. Paul is not describing a rule he keeps. He is describing where his attention goes, and therefore where his energy goes.

Attention has a cost. A man whose attention is set on pleasing a person spends himself on it, and eleven days is roughly what it costs.

You have been spending on an audience that was never the one being answered to, and Scripture puts the answering to God rather than to a visitor. The Spirit of God is the one who redirects that, and it is written in 1 Thessalonians 2 where the real account sits.

And there is something practical hidden in the word trieth that will help on the day itself.

A trying is continuous. It is not an event. Metal is not assayed once a year on a Tuesday; the process is what it is under.

So Tuesday is not an examination interrupting an ordinary year. It is three hours of a year that is already being examined all the way through, by somebody who has been present for the other three hundred and sixty-two days.

You are inside a continuous assessment rather than facing an annual one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been present for the whole of it. It is written that God trieth our hearts as an ongoing thing, and 1 Thessalonians 2:4 is where the trying is described.

The performance is not dishonesty

Let me take one weight off, because there has been a half accusation running underneath all of this.

The word performance has been getting used as though it named a moral failing. It does not.

Tidying up before somebody comes is not lying. Being slightly more formal with a visitor than with your own people is not two-facedness. Every human being on earth adjusts for a guest and always has.

You are not being dishonest on Tuesday, and the written word never once called ordinary adjustment a fault in anybody. The Spirit of God is the one who can tell a performance from a deception, and He is not accusing you of the second one.

What is costing eleven days is something else, and it is worth naming precisely.

It is not the three hours. It is the anticipation, and the anticipation exists because somewhere along the way those three hours became the sample. Out of a whole year, that is the bit that counts.

That is not true. It is not even true commercially, and it is certainly not true in the account that matters.

You have been treating three hours as the sample of a year, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has the whole year in view. Scripture puts the assessment on the heart rather than on a snapshot, and 1 Thessalonians 2 is where the object of the trying gets named.

Wednesday morning, same order

So here is the thing to do, and it is not on Tuesday. It is the day after.

On Wednesday morning, do the same work in the same order you did it on Tuesday. Not to prove anything to anybody. Nobody will be there and nobody will know.

Open the same way. Do the first thing you did on Tuesday. Then the second. Go through the morning in that order deliberately.

You are proving something to yourself rather than to a visitor, and 1 Thessalonians 2:4 says God is the one who tries the heart. The Spirit of God is the one who is present on the Wednesday exactly as He was on the Tuesday, and He does not change register.

The reason it works is that eleven days of anticipation quietly teach a man that Tuesday is a different kind of day, and therefore that he is a different kind of man on it.

Doing Wednesday in Tuesday's order breaks that. It says with your hands rather than your head: this is the same building and the same man and the same standard.

You have been the same man the whole time, and the Holy Spirit is the one who settles that in a man on an ordinary morning. The written word puts the trying on a heart that does not change between a Tuesday and a Wednesday, and 1 Thessalonians 2:4 is where the constancy comes from.

Then open the same door in the morning and go on with the rest of the year, and the visit is over for another one.