May 2022 Mobile Monthly Mission Challenge
By Kat Silverglate Copyright 2022
When my son and daughter-in-love were expecting our grandchild, they decided to call her “Tuesday” until they landed on the name. For months, “Tuesday” was an uncharacteristically popular word in our family chatter. One that sparked joy, triggered expectation, and summoned delight — even in the most unexpected circumstances. The dermatology receptionist, exploring dates for my dreaded follow-up, asks:
“How does March 2nd sound?”
“What day of the week is that?” I respond, hoping for an irreconcilable conflict.
“It’s a Tuesday,” she offers with gnat-sized enthusiasm.
“Tuesday,” I repeat with a weird, dreamy grin. “Tuesday is perfect.”
In the presence of new life, all things Tuesday just seemed brighter.
In her book Simply Tuesday: Small Moment Living in a Fast-Moving World, Emily P. Freeman speaks about “ordinary time” and how Tuesdays are the perfect backdrop for the miracle of God’s presence. After framing her premise with Lorne Michael’s litmus test for a great TV production – “when he does his job right, he leaves no fingerprints” – she goes on to describe how our ordinary Tuesdays are the best producers of life’s weeks:
What happens here, if done right, if done well, leaves no fingerprints – dinner around the table, laundry folded in the baskets, the meeting with the boss over coffee, five hundred more words toward the deadline. The big stuff of life, we save for the weekend. Tuesday holds the ordinary, the everyday, and the small.
Emily P. Freeman, Simply Tuesday
I love that, but here’s an embarrassing confession -- fingerprint-less Tuesday places aren’t so celebrated by the world, which makes me think I’d be an awful producer. If I’m bare here, I must admit invisibility is challenging for me. It’s not pretty, I know, but it is true.
The provider who commutes an hour each way in rush hour at O-Dark-Thirty week after week, month after month, year after year. The janitor who scrubs the cafeteria floor, or the nurse who cleans the vomit. The volunteer who holds out dixie cups of fluid to marathon runners who drench them as they grab and go. The neighbor who drives the elderly couple to the grocery store or reads to a dyslexic child. The leader who prays regularly for his or her team by name. The sibling who cares for a diminished parent. These printless places aren’t magnified by society. They are crushingly beautiful acts, but they don’t announce value the way the world keeps defining it.
So we dust. We dust for fingerprints. Usually, our own. I know I do. I wonder if the Tuesday moments really matter if nobody sees my prints. Nobody acknowledges whether, or how, they count.
Turns out the disciples were dusters too, arguing about who would be considered the greatest amongst them. Who had the most visible prints. Who would sit at the right and left of Christ. Meanwhile, knowing He was about to give His life for them, the Lord was on His knees in a servant’s towel washing two dozen dirty feet, one by one.
[He] got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him….
John 13:4-5
When Peter objected, telling the Lord that the master shouldn’t be the one to get low and handle his dirt, Jesus washes his feet anyway and then ups the ante:
… He put on his clothes and returned to his place. “Do you understand what I have done for you?” he asked them. “You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you. Very truly I tell you, no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them.
John 13:12-17
Sinclair Ferguson, in his book Lessons from the Upper Room, reminds us that this wasn’t simply a how-to tutorial for moral living, it was an “acted parable” of God’s gift to humanity. In physical movement, He steps down from his position, puts on the clothing of a servant, serves His disciples and then puts His clothing back on and returns to His position. For us, in the doing, the bowing low, the serving in printless places, we are transformed in our understanding of who God is, what He did and how He changes lives.
The aide who bathed my mother in her last days, the anonymous friend who left flowers on my doorstep after she died, the strangers who prayed me through grief – all Tuesday lovers. Printless. Perhaps if I dusted enough, I’d figure out who they were; but I’m pretty sure that misses the point. Their Tuesday love — their humility — allowed me to focus on the Lord’s fingerprints. On His mighty hand on my one ridiculous life.
Our May Mission:
There are two items in your mission pack this month – a row of four Tuesday stickers and a small, sealed envelope with the message “Open on the last Tuesday of the month.” For the first four Tuesdays of May, consider serving someone without leaving any prints. Be wise and safe. Be simple. In the days leading to your Tuesday love, pray about it. Pray for the Lord’s hand to be the visible thing. Perhaps use your sticker to remind you of your Tuesday mission. Or use it in your journal to meditate on what the Lord stirred up in you.
On the last Tuesday of May, open the small envelope, read the message inside and use the remaining items in the small envelope. If you don’t have a physical mission pack, click the “request materials” at the side or top of this page. We'll be happy to send you a pack while supplies last.
We pray that “all things Tuesday” become brighter as you walk out this mission in the light of Christ.
