The Night Bus Home After the Double

Twenty to midnight and the bus is nearly empty and Andrene has the front seat on the top deck, which she takes when she can because it is the closest thing to a good moment her Thursdays contain.

She has done two shifts back to back. She was not supposed to and then Marie's mother was taken in and there was nobody, and she said yes at four in the afternoon the way she always says yes, and here she is.

Her feet have that particular heat. Her back is fine, actually, her back is not the problem tonight. It is the other thing, the one that is harder to describe, where your body is still working perfectly and your mind has simply left the building.

She puts her forehead on the glass.

And she tries to pray, because she always tries to pray on this bus, and she gets four words in and it goes. Not to something else. It just goes, the way a signal goes, and she comes back thirty seconds later realizing she has been looking at a bus stop.

She tries again. Same thing.

And then comes the part that has been happening to Andrene for eleven years and that nobody has ever helped her with, which is the small hard sentence that arrives afterward.

Today does not count.

That is the rule she runs and she did not invent it deliberately. A day counts if you prayed properly in it. If you did not, if you were too tired or too flat or too scattered, then whatever else the day contained, spiritually the day was a zero. Not a sin. A zero.

She has done that arithmetic quietly since she was twenty-seven, and if you made her total it up she would tell you, honestly, that she probably has about a hundred and forty days a year that do not count.

She is thirty-eight. She has been doing this a long time.

The bus goes round the corner by the church that is a carpet showroom now, and the lights swing across, and she catches her own reflection in the window with the whole street going through it, and a phrase she has not thought about in years arrives out of nowhere and sits down beside her.

Magnified in my body.

You have that rule. Yours might have a different threshold. But you know what your day has to contain to count, and you know roughly how many did not this year.

Paul says it about a body, from a prison

Philippians is written from custody. Paul does not know the outcome, he says so plainly in that chapter, and he is weighing up whether he is going to live or die and saying so out loud to people he loves.

And this is what he says he expects and hopes for.

According to my earnest expectation and my hope, that in nothing I shall be ashamed, but that with all boldness, as always, so now also Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether it be by life, or by death.Philippians 1:20

Christ shall be magnified in my body.

Not in my devotional life. Not in my clarity. Not in my alertness at the end of a long day. A man in a cell, with limited control over anything, says that the thing he expects is that Christ will be made large in his body.

You have a body, and Scripture names it as the place Christ is magnified, and it is already yours. That is the written word and not my comfort on a bus, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence written under guard and lays it on the top deck at twenty to midnight.

And now the clause that closes every exit your rule has. Whether it be by life, or by death.

Paul covers both ends. He is saying: if I live, this happens; if I die, this happens. And if the two extremes are both covered, then everything in between them is covered, which includes a Thursday where a woman is too tired to finish a sentence.

There is no state of a body in that verse where the magnifying stops being possible. He has ruled out the two hardest cases in one clause.

A lens is not a light

Now the word itself, because it is a picture and the picture does the work.

To magnify is to make something look larger. That is what a lens does. And the thing to notice about a lens is that it does not generate anything. It has no light of its own, none, not a flicker. It takes what is already coming through and enlarges it.

Which means a lens is not assessed on its strength. It is assessed on whether it is in the path.

You have been grading yourself on the wrong property for eleven years. You have been asking whether the glass was strong tonight, whether it was clear, whether it was up to the task. The only question the picture asks is whether the light is coming through it, and the light was never yours to produce.

This is yours, and the magnifying is His work through you and not your work for Him, and it is already happening. Philippians 1 says Christ shall be magnified in my body, and the same Spirit who kept Paul steady in custody is the one making it a present fact in a woman with her forehead on a window.

Let me guard this properly, because there is a version of it that would take something from you that you should keep.

I am not telling you that prayer does not matter or that you should stop trying on that bus. Keep trying. Four words is a prayer. Your four words tonight were a prayer, and the thirty seconds you spent looking at a bus stop afterward were not a failure, they were a tired woman on a bus.

And I am not telling you your tiredness is holy in itself. It is not a spiritual state. It is what happens after sixteen hours, and it is honest to call it that.

What I am telling you is that the rule is not from Scripture. Nowhere does the Bible grade a day by whether the person in it managed a proper prayer, and the man who wrote the verse we are standing on wrote it in circumstances where he could control almost nothing, and he still expected Christ to be made large through him.