Tuesday

Fridays are awesome. It’s the end of the week and you dream of what your weekend will behold. Saturdays are great. Freedom to do what you please. Mondays? Monday’s usually not a favorite day of the week. Tuesdays? I don’t think Tuesdays register high on the “favorite days of the week” list either. God changed my mind about Tuesdays.

When I was 25 I was asked to be in charge of our congregation’s youth group, more specifically, the teenage girls age 12 to 18. In this position I was responsible for of a number of activities including their Sunday church lessons as well as an activity each week on Tuesday night. This “mid-week” activity was a time for the girls to have a safe place to come and hang out. They could have some fun, make friends and hopefully get a little spiritual lift to their week.

Soon my husband was also working with the boys in the youth group. We were busy. I worked with the girls for six years. It was during this period of time that we began to figure out that infertility was going to be an issue that we had to face. We were 28 when we decided we should probably go get ourselves checked out. I’m just going to put this out there: fertility tests sucks. And they suck for both girls and boys. These tests are the great gender equalizer.

What is worse than the tests themselves is waiting for the results. You go and have horrible things happen to you and then wait to find out what’s wrong with you. Our first bad diagnosis came on a Tuesday. We’d gotten a call while we were at work with the worst news. I cried myself home and when we got home from work we’d had just a moment together before we had to run off to our Tuesday night activity with teenagers. We put on what one of my friends refers to as his velcro smile. Slap that fake smile on your face and make it seem like everything is fine even when a smile is that last things you’d prefer to be wearing. I wanted to stay home and bask in the glory that was my broken heart. But we went and a funny thing happened that night. We went in with our velcro smiles and came out with legitimate smiles on our faces. Because let’s face it, teenagers are hilarious. Sometimes even “pee your pants” hilarious. We were doing something good. We were forgetting about ourselves and our problems and focusing on someone else for a little while. When we got home that night the news didn’t feel as soul crushing.

From that point on we always seemed to get our worst news on a Tuesday. It became almost comical. Go in for a test on a Thursday. “We’ll call you Monday.” We’d hear back on Tuesday. We always went to those activities though. It helped. God gave us Tuesdays to help us. They were always the most exhausting days of the week but your couldn’t help but leave those activities happy. Like really happy.  A man I greatly admire once had the best advice for when life isn’t going your way: “Forget yourself and go to work.” I learned this was true.

Looking back on this experience I realize that serving in this capacity was one of the most influential opportunities in my life. I learned so many skills and I learned to love more fully. I love each of those kids that carouseled in and out of my life during this time. Some for a very short time and some for a longer. Each of their names is written on my heart and I will always love and care for every one of them.

Then after six years and four months, God decided it was someone else’s turn to have Tuesdays. That works out to about 320 Tuesdays! I didn’t want to give them up but he decided it was time. I had learned what I needed to and it was time for different lessons.

Tuesdays aren’t the same for us these days. To be honest we think about that time in our lives and it makes us tired. But I am so grateful that I had Tuesdays during that period of infertility discovery. That was a time that I wanted to just wallow in “it.” I had wanted to eat “it” and die. I didn’t have time for “it” though. Thank goodness. I had better things to do with my Tuesdays.