The Middle of the Week

Pastor James opened by admitting something most sermons don't: most weeks don't have a spiritual high point. There's no burning bush on a Wednesday. There's a commute, a load of laundry, an email you're avoiding, and somewhere in there, if you're lucky, five quiet minutes.

Lamentations is a strange place to go looking for hope — it's a book written in the wreckage of a destroyed city. But right in the middle of all that grief, the writer says God's mercies are 'new every morning.' Not new every miracle. Every morning. Ordinary, unremarkable, Tuesday-morning mercy.

James walked through three places that verse tends to get tested: the morning you dread going to work, the argument you're still replaying from last night, and the long stretch where nothing seems to be changing — in a marriage, a job search, a diagnosis. In each one, he argued, faithfulness doesn't usually arrive as a dramatic rescue. It shows up as the strength to do the next small thing.

He closed with a challenge to stop waiting for a mountaintop before we take God seriously. 'If mercy is only new on the good mornings,' he said, 'it was never really new every morning. It was just new on the days we noticed.' The invitation this week: notice one ordinary morning like it's the mercy it actually is.