The Ones We Remember Are Never The Expensive Ones

Your family has about four days they bring up.

You know which ones. Somebody starts with do you remember when, and everybody joins in, and the details are wrong and nobody minds, and it is always the same four.

And here is what is annoying about the list. It is not the ones you paid for.

It is the afternoon the car would not start and you all sat on a wall. It is the day it poured and you ate chips in a bus shelter. It is the time you went nowhere at all and something happened in the garden that has become a whole family expression.

Meanwhile the expensive ones, the ones that took planning and saving and a year of looking forward, mostly do not come up. They were fine. Nobody has a bad word for them. They simply did not become anything.

That could be a depressing observation and I do not want to leave it there, because there is something much more useful inside it.

If the days that turn into something are not the ones you buy, then the supply is not limited by money, and that changes what you are waiting for.

This is the day which the LORD hath made

There is a line people quote so often that it has stopped meaning anything, and the pronoun in it is doing all the work.

This is the day which the LORD hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it. (Psalm 118:24, King James Version)

This is the day.

Not one day. Not a day. This one, the one currently in progress, the specific Tuesday you are standing in with the shopping to put away.

That word this is pointing at something, and it is pointing at the day that is actually happening rather than at days in general. Which means the sentence cannot be kept for good days, because the day it refers to is whichever one you are in.

And hath made is past tense. The making is finished. It is not a day being assembled based on what you do with it. It arrived already made, and the response described is to be glad in it, in it, inside the thing rather than about it afterwards.

I am not going to turn that into an instruction to feel a certain way about a Tuesday. That is how the verse gets ruined. What I want from it is the pointing: at this one. Not the good one coming. This one.

You are standing in a day that was already made, and it has never once needed to be an impressive one to be the one you are in. Psalm 118:24 points at the day in progress rather than at days in general, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that specific instead of decorative.

What the four days have in common

Here is the thing worth noticing about your list, because it tells you what to do.

The four days are not remembered because they were simple. Simplicity is not the ingredient and I am not going to tell you that less is more.

What they have in common is that you were all in the same place with nothing to get through.

That is the actual ingredient. On the day the car broke down, there was no schedule left. Nobody was checking the time. The plan had already failed, so nobody was managing it, and everybody was simply there, together, for two hours with nothing to complete.

The expensive days rarely have that, because an expensive day has a program. There is a thing to see, a time to be somewhere, a value to extract from what was spent, and the whole family can feel it. You spend the day getting through the day.

So the ingredient is not cheapness. It is unstructured time in the same place. That is why the free ones win: not because they are virtuous, but because nothing is scheduled and nobody is trying to get anywhere.

You are able to give your family time with nothing to get through, and it has never once depended on what the day cost. The written word points at the day in hand rather than at a better one, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a family stop trying to complete an afternoon.

Somewhere free, and stay two hours

So here is the assignment, and the second half is the part that matters.

Take the family somewhere free this week and stay two hours.

Anywhere free: a bit of grass, a park, a stretch of path, a bench somewhere with a view of nothing in particular. Take food from the house.

And stay two hours. That is the whole assignment and it is the only difficult part.

Because at about forty minutes there is a pull toward leaving. Everyone has looked at everything, somebody is a bit bored, and the sensible thing is to go home and get on with the evening. That forty minute mark is exactly where most family outings end, and it is exactly where the day would have started turning into something.

The four days on your list all went past forty minutes. That is what a broken down car does for you: it removes the option of leaving.

So stay. Let it get boring. Boredom is not the failure of the outing, it is the doorway into the part where somebody starts a game nobody planned.

Psalm 118:24 puts the gladness inside the day rather than after it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in the second hour when nothing is scheduled.

You are able to stay past the point where you would normally leave, and it has never once been the first forty minutes that a family remembers. Psalm 118:24 names the day already made and hands it over as it is, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with you on a bit of grass in the second hour.