There Are No Saturdays In This House

Everything about this is written for people with Saturdays.

You read it and you agree with it and then you get to the part about a Saturday morning and something in you closes.

Here is what your Saturday is actually made of.

Two of them are somewhere at nine. One of those needs collecting at eleven from a different place. There is the thing at your mother's every other week. There is the shop. There is whatever did not get done in the week, which is most things.

By four in the afternoon you have driven about forty miles inside a five mile radius.

And you are not complaining about this and you would not swap it. Those are good things, and your children are in them, and the reason they exist is that you and your husband have made them exist.

But every article that assumes a Saturday morning is an article for a different household, and you have read about nine of them.

So this one takes the Saturday out.

For there were many coming and going

There is a moment in Mark where Jesus tells the disciples to come away, and the reason given is very specific.

And he said unto them, Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while: for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat. (Mark 6:31, King James Version)

Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while, for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat.

There were many coming and going. That is the description of their week, and it is written without one word of criticism.

You have a passage that describes a life with no room in it and does not blame anybody for the shape of it, and Mark 6:31 has never once treated a full week as a failure of priorities. The coming and going is stated as the situation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who finds the gap that a person cannot see from inside the week.

You are able to notice what is not in that verse.

There is no suggestion that they had over committed. There is no instruction to cancel anything. Nobody is told to reduce the number of people coming and going, which would have been the obvious advice and which is the advice that arrives twice a year from people who mean well.

The people coming and going were the work. That was the point of the whole thing.

So the answer is not less. The answer is a specific piece of ground taken out of the middle of it.

You are able to take something out of the middle of a full week without canceling any of it, and Mark 6:31 has never once required a household to do less first. The Spirit of God is the one who finds a desert place inside a crowded week, and the verse names the crowding without blaming anybody for it.

The gap you already have

Here is the practical work, and it is not on a Saturday.

There is a gap in your week and it is not where you have been looking.

You have a week with a hole in it that you have never once used, and Mark 6:31 has never made the resting depend on the week being emptier. It is written come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a woman a piece of her own week she has stopped seeing.

You have been looking at Saturday and Sunday because that is where everybody looks. And your weekend is the fullest part of your week, which is true of most families with children in things, and which nobody who writes about this seems to know.

The gaps are on weekdays and they are in strange places.

Between the school run and the thing at half past four. The twenty minutes of waiting outside somewhere. The hour on a Tuesday that is unaccountably empty and currently gets spent catching up.

That last one is the one. There is one afternoon or one early evening in your week that is quieter than the others and you know which it is.

And it does not feel like a candidate because it is not a weekend, and because you have been using it to catch up, and because catching up feels compulsory.

You are able to take ten minutes out of the catching up, and doing that has never once put you further behind than you already are. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in an unremarkable Tuesday afternoon, and Mark 6:31 puts the resting inside the coming and going rather than after it.

Put it in the weekday gap

So here is the assignment.

Take the ten minutes out of Saturday entirely and put it in the gap you already have on a weekday.

You are able to build a household habit that never touches a weekend, and doing it on a Tuesday has never once made it less of a family thing. It is written for there were many coming and going, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is out on a road on a weekday afternoon with a mother and whoever is with her.

Name the gap out loud so it becomes a place rather than a leftover. Tuesday after school. Thursday before the thing. Whichever one it actually is.

Take whoever is with you at that point, which in the middle of a weekday is usually one or two of them rather than all, and that is the whole of what this site asks for anyway.

And do not save Saturday for it. Do not think of the weekday version as a substitute for the proper thing that will happen when Saturdays free up in about six years. This is the thing.

Ten minutes, on a Tuesday, with two of them, in the middle of a week that is entirely full.

You have a place in your own week that has been there all along, and needing it pointed out has never once meant you were disorganized. Mark 6:31 finds a desert place in the middle of a crowd, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in the ten minutes nobody scheduled.