Strange Tales, Week 4
A Guide of Sorts
Each week picks up where Sunday left off. A sermon can only hold so much, so these six mornings go back into the passage and sit with the parts we ran past. Read the short passage first, in your own Bible if you have one handy. Then read the reflection. Then pray, in these words or your own. Six days, Monday through Saturday, and then we are back together.
One thread runs under all of it. We are people who like to name things before we understand them, and skip the parts we cannot name at all. This whole series is leaning how to practice the opposite. So, every morning the hope is to keep asking, one way or another, the same two questions...
What am I trying to name before morning?
Where is God in the part of the story I usually skip?
Strange Tales, Week 4:
Monday:
“...a young man named Eutychus, who was sitting in the window, began to sink off into a deep sleep while Paul talked still longer.”
- Acts 20:9
Let me defend Eutychus for a minute, because the church has spent two thousand years making him the punch line. It is the first day of the week. The room is upstairs, packed with bodies, lit by lamps that are burning up the oxygen and throwing off heat. It is past midnight. And Paul will not stop talking. Of course the kid falls asleep. I would have fallen asleep. You would have fallen asleep.
There is not a person reading this who has not, at some point, been the one drifting off in the exact place they were supposed to be most awake. That is the honest doorway into this story, and it is a gentle one. Before Eutychus is a miracle, he is just a tired person in a window, trying and failing to stay present to something holy.
Which, if we are telling the truth, is most of us, most of the time.
We do not usually fall out of windows. But we fall out of the rooms we most need to be in all the time. We nod off in a friendship. We drift out of a small group. We go quiet on the people who know us best, not because we stopped loving them, but because we had nothing left to bring.
What room have you been drifting out of lately, not because you wanted to leave, but because you were simply too tired to stay?
A Prayer for Today
God, some rooms I have left were rooms I never meant to leave. I was just too tired to stay. Meet me in the drift before I fall the rest of the way out. Amen.
Tuesday:
“Overcome by sleep, he fell to the ground three floors below and was picked up dead.”
- Acts 20:9
All series long we have been noticing the same trick. The narrator never tells us the whole thing. Jacob's story will not name the wrestler. The donkey sees before the prophet does. The bears text reports something horrifying and does not flinch. Today the trick runs the other direction. Luke writes one sentence, he was picked up dead, and just keeps moving. No gasp. No pause for us to catch our breath. He is on to the next sentence like nothing happened.
It is, honestly, the flattest resurrection you will find anywhere in scripture. If it were a movie, there would be a swell of music. Luke does not even change his tone. He buries the biggest thing that happens in this entire book inside a subordinate clause, and if you are skimming, you will miss it completely.
I wonder how often we do the same thing to the good news in our own lives. We are so used to narrating our days in a flat, minimizing voice, it was fine, I'm managing, nothing to report, that we bury our own small resurrections the same way Luke buries this one. A phone call that finally happened. A door that opened after months of nothing. We say it was fine and keep walking.
What is a small resurrection in your own life this year that you have been describing far too flatly?
A Prayer for Today
God, help me stop underselling what you have done. Let me say it plainly instead of burying it in a clause. Amen.
Wednesday:
“But Paul went down, and bending over him took him in his arms, and said, ‘Do not be alarmed, for his life is in him.’”
- Acts 20:10
Notice everything that does not happen in this verse. Nobody asks Eutychus what he was doing sitting in the window in the first place. Nobody pauses to make a point about staying awake during a sermon. Nobody waits for an explanation before deciding whether he is worth going down for. Paul just goes down.
That is the piece of this story I most want us to carry into Hermiston. We are quick, sometimes, to require an account before we will offer help. What happened. Why did you let it get this bad. Why didn't you call sooner. Every one of those questions might be fair eventually. None of them belongs at the bottom of the stairs.
I think about the people I know who went quiet on their community, on their church, on their friends, and stayed quiet longer than they needed to, because the thought of explaining the gap felt harder than the gap itself. Embarrassment is a strong enough current to keep a person away from exactly the people who would have caught them.
If our church has a job in moments like that, it is to be faster than the embarrassment. To go down before the explanation is ready.
Who in your life might be staying away longer than they want to, simply because they do not know how to explain the gap?
A Prayer for Today
God, make me quick to go down and slow to ask why. Let presence get there before the questions do. Amen.
Thursday:
“...took him in his arms, and said, ‘Do not be alarmed, for his life is in him.’”
- Acts 20:10
Paul does not say I have given him life. He does not say watch what I can do. He says his life is in him, present tense, already there. Paul is not performing a miracle so much as telling the truth about one that already happened. He is naming what is already present instead of deciding it for the boy.
We have seen this move before this series. Jacob got to name his own night and call the place Peniel. The donkey got to see before anyone gave the prophet permission to. Over and over, this whole series has been pointing at a God, and a community, that does not force anything on anyone. It shows up, wraps around what has fallen, and tells the truth about the life that is already there.
That is a different posture than fixing someone. Fixing assumes something is missing that we have to supply. Naming assumes the life was never gone, only unnoticed, or unbelieved, or buried under exhaustion and everyone's demands.
Is there someone in your life who does not need you to fix them, only to tell them the truth about what is already there?
A Prayer for Today
God, let me stop trying to fix people and start telling them the truth about the life already in them. Amen.
Friday:
“Then Paul went upstairs, and after he had broken bread and eaten, he continued to converse with them until dawn.”
- Acts 20:11
Look at the shape of the whole scene one more time. They were breaking bread when Eutychus fell. Paul goes down, and comes back up, and breaks bread again. The falling, the death, the rescue, all of it happens inside the ordinary act of a community sharing a table. The meal does not stop because someone fell. The meal is still there when they come back.
That detail matters more than it looks like it should. It would have been easy for the story to end the moment Eutychus was breathing again, miracle complete, curtain down. Instead, Luke tells us the ordinary thing kept going. They kept eating. They kept talking. And later, they walked the boy home.
I think that is what belonging is supposed to feel like. Not a single dramatic rescue and then silence. A meal that keeps being set, a chair that keeps being saved, whether or not you make it back to the table on time.
What would it look like this week to keep a seat warm for someone, even if you are not sure when, or whether, they will come back to it?
A Prayer for Today
God, help me keep the table set for the people who are not at it yet. Let my welcome not have an expiration date. Amen.
Saturday:
“Meanwhile, they had taken the boy away alive and were not a little comforted.”
- Acts 20:12
It is a strange way to end a story. Not, they rejoiced. Not, they praised God with a loud voice. They were not a little comforted. A double negative, the kind of phrase you reach for when the comfort was too big to say plainly, so you undersell it instead. Which means, of course, that it was enormous.
I want to be honest with you about something before this series closes. I have a friend named Jon. We came up in ministry together, and for a long season, some of my hardest years, we carried each other on long phone calls during a commute that nearly wrecked me. Then exhaustion caught us both, and those calls slowed to almost nothing for the better part of a year. Neither of us stopped loving the other. We just stopped going downstairs. This week, we finally talked again, and I told him plainly, I need to sprint down the stairs for you, and I am asking you to do the same for me.
That is not a tidy ending. It is a promise to go down faster next time, made by two tired people who know exactly how easy it is to let the silence stretch. I suspect most of us have a Jon. Someone we have been carrying in our hearts without pursuing. This is your nudge, and mine, to call.
Four weeks ago we started this series with a promise to stay in strange stories instead of running from them. We wrestled in the dark and never got a name. We watched a donkey see what a prophet could not. We sat with a grief nobody let breathe. And this week, we watched a tired kid fall out of a window, and a whole room refuse to let that be the end of his story.
Who is the person you have been carrying without pursuing? What would it take to call them this week?
A Prayer for Today
God, thank you for four weeks of strange and honest stories. Give me the courage to go downstairs for the person I have been meaning to call. And when I fall, let me trust that somebody is already coming for me. Amen.