There's Always a Tuesday After the Sunday
It's Tuesday, May 26th, and if you were in church on Sunday, you know what happened. The rushing wind. The tongues of fire. The birth of something electric. And then Monday hit. The emails piled up, the news cycle churned, and by Tuesday morning that spiritual fire that felt so alive can start to feel like it's cooling into gray embers.
I've felt that. I think most of us have. You catch a moment in a sermon, a song, a quiet beat in the liturgy where the veil between the ordinary and the sacred feels tissue-paper thin — and then Tuesday comes and it's gone.
So this week's episode starts with a simple question: what do we do with the fire when the day of celebration is over?
The Spirit Was Never Meant to Stay Indoors
The Pentecost reading from Acts 2 is one of the most dramatic passages in scripture — and I think we've domesticated it. We focus on the wind and the fire and the tongues, which are extraordinary. But the part that stops me every time is what happens next. They don't stay in the room.
The crowd gathers in the streets because something is happening out there. People from Parthia, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Rome, Arabia — all of them hearing the disciples speak in their own native language. Not because the disciples studied linguistics. Because the Spirit moved through them in a way that crossed every barrier human beings had constructed to keep each other separate.
That's not a private spiritual experience. That's a public explosion. And it's the part of Pentecost we don't put on the poster.
This week, New York City started transforming 50 city blocks into car-free "soccer streets" ahead of the World Cup — clearing out the traffic and noise and replacing it with youth clinics, art stations, and open space for community. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12 that the Spirit is given to each person not for private use, but for the common good. Those soccer streets are exactly that. Strangers becoming neighbors on a piece of asphalt because someone cleared out the clutter and made room.
The question I kept sitting with: what's your soccer street? What's the space in your life where you've cleared out the noise to make room for actual human connection?
Seventy Years Is a Long Time — But It's Not Forever
I want to tell you about a jaguar named Ombu.
This week, conservationists confirmed that Ombu — a young male jaguar — is now roaming free in El Impenetrable National Park in Argentina. The wild jaguar had been absent from that part of the country for seventy years. Long enough for an entire generation to assume it was never coming back.
And then Ombu walked out of the shadows.
Psalm 104 says: "You send forth your Spirit, and they are created; and so you renew the face of the earth." Not renewed — renews. Present tense. Ongoing. Right now.
The jaguar story cracked something open for me. The ecosystem didn't stop being worth something just because the jaguar was gone. The renewal was always possible. The conditions for it were being quietly tended.
I think about that in terms of the places in my own life — and maybe yours — that have gone quiet. The faith that used to feel alive. The relationship that's been on autopilot. The part of yourself that you put away because life got too loud. Seventy years is a long time. But the Spirit that renews the face of the earth has not forgotten those places.
The rewilding is always on the table.
The Spirit Out in the Camp
There's one more story I keep returning to this week — the one from Numbers 11 that doesn't get enough attention.
Moses is at the end of his rope. God tells him to gather seventy elders around the tent so the Spirit can be distributed and Moses doesn't have to carry everything alone. It works. But then two men — Eldad and Medad — who weren't at the official gathering start prophesying out in the camp among the ordinary people.
Joshua panics and runs to Moses: stop them. They weren't supposed to be part of this.
And Moses says something I've been turning over all week: "Would that all the Lord's people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them."
Moses didn't want the Spirit to stay at the tent. He wanted it everywhere. He wanted ordinary people in the middle of the crowd to be carriers of it.
The Pentecost story is Moses's prayer answered at full scale. The Spirit didn't only show up at the tent. It showed up in the street. It showed up in a national park in Argentina where a jaguar walked back out of the shadows. It shows up on a Tuesday morning when you weren't sure there was anything left to show up for.
Look for your jaguar moments this week. Look for your soccer street. The wind is still blowing. Keep your sails up.
Listen to the full episode of Monday to Sunday wherever you get your podcasts.