The Tribunal Is on Tuesday

She walks it. Front room to the hall, hall to the kitchen, kitchen back, and she has worn a slightly different color into the carpet by the door without noticing.

Tuesday.

She rehearses. She has three versions now. The calm one where she sets it out in order and does not react. The one where she says the thing about what actually happened in February, which she will not say. And a third one, which is not really words, which is what happens in her chest at about the fourth circuit.

She did not do it. That is the flat fact under all of it. She knows precisely who said what and why, and she has an email, and she has been told by two people that the email is helpful and by one person that it might make things worse.

Eleven years at that place.

And she is a woman who prays. She has prayed about this every day since the letter, and she has been sent verses by three different people, and one of them was the one about no weapon formed, which she used to like.

It is twenty past eleven. She stops by the window because her legs have got tired, which is the only thing that ever stops her.

And the sentence that has been arriving lately is not about the tribunal at all. It is about the praying. It is: I have run out of ways to say I am blessed while that date sits in my week and gets closer.

If you have a date in your calendar that you are walking a floor about, you know that carpet. And you know how a phrase can wear out in your own mouth about four hundred repetitions before the thing it describes has changed at all.

The word, before the date

Let me walk the circuit with you and say the plain thing at the window.

The problem is not Tuesday. Tuesday is a hearing and hearings are survivable and you have an email. The problem is that a word you have been standing on has been said so many times against an unmoving date that it has gone smooth in your mouth, and a woman cannot tell from inside whether that means the word is empty or she is simply tired.

So let me give it back to you with its meaning attached, because the version that wears out is always the version that meant something else.

Blessed does not mean the hearing goes your way. It means the favor of God is resting on a person, His face is turned toward them. That is what it means, and if it had ever meant a good outcome then Tuesday would be a test of it, and Tuesday is not a test of it and never could be.

Now let me take you to a furnace, and I want you to notice when the fourth man appears.

He answered and said, Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.Daniel 3:25

Count the sequence. Three men refuse. Three men are bound. The furnace is heated seven times more than usual and it is so hot that it kills the men who throw them in. Three men go into the fire.

And then there are four.

The fourth does not appear at the door. He does not appear when they come out. He appears in the middle of the fire, and He is seen by the king from outside, and the king is the one who has to say it out loud.

You have somebody with you inside the thing rather than waiting for you on the other side of it, and that is exactly where the fourth man turned up. Daniel 3:25 puts Him in the midst of the fire, and it is the Holy Spirit whom Jesus promised would be with His people always, which means the pattern in that chapter is not a one off in a history book.

What the three said before any of it

Now I want to give you the sentence those three men said before they went in, because it is the strongest thing in the chapter and it is not the part people quote.

They are asked to bow. They refuse. And when the king threatens the furnace, they say: our God whom we serve is able to deliver us, and He will deliver us out of thine hand, O king.

And then they say the next bit.

But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods.

But if not. Three men, at the edge of a furnace, holding both halves at once. He is able. He may not. Either way we are not bowing.

That is the most honest sentence anybody says in the entire Old Testament about outcomes, and it comes from people who were about to be vindicated spectacularly and who did not know that when they said it.

You are allowed to say both halves before Tuesday, and the men in that chapter said them out loud at the door of the furnace. Daniel 3:18 records the but if not without a word of rebuke attached, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes it possible to hold trust and uncertainty together rather than requiring a person to fake a certainty they do not have.

Which is what your prayers have actually needed for three weeks. You have been trying to say only the first half, over and over, and it has worn out, because a sentence that has to carry a guarantee it was never given gets thin.

Say both halves and the first half comes back to life.

You have a God who is able, and you have a Tuesday whose outcome is His, and holding both is the position those three took standing up. Scripture puts the two clauses side by side in one speech, and His Spirit is the one who keeps a person steady in the second half rather than needing them to pretend it is not there.

What I will not tell you about Tuesday

Now, plainly.

I am not going to tell you it goes your way. I do not know. I know you have an email and I know you did not do it and neither of those is a guarantee, because processes are processes and you have been at that place eleven years and you know how it works better than I do.

And I am not going to tell you God is going to vindicate you publicly, because the three men in that chapter were and Jeremiah was not and Paul was executed by a state, and the same God was with all of them.

What I will tell you is what the chapter actually says, which is that the fourth man was in the fire, and that the three came out with no smell of smoke on them, and that the thing the fire burned was the ropes.

That is the one thing that was destroyed. They went in bound and they were walking around loose.

You are walking loose inside a thing you were bound to, and the fire in that chapter burned the ropes and nothing else. Daniel 3:25 says loose before it says anything about coming out, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the Spirit of liberty, which is why loose is a present description rather than a promise about Wednesday.

And go to Tuesday with somebody. A union rep, a colleague, a friend to sit outside. Send the email in advance in writing. That is what a person does and it is not a lack of trust.