Ferry Times and a Paint Chart

The binder is still in the bag under the table, because taking it out of the bag was a habit before it was a decision, and habits take longer to stop than plans do.

They are in the garden center cafe because it was in the diary and because neither of them could think of a reason to cancel that would not have to be explained. There is a pot of tea between them and a scone she is not going to eat. Somewhere behind them a trolley catches on the ridge in the floor by the till, the way it does, and two women at the next table are having a proper laugh about a greenhouse.

She takes it out anyway, out of the bag, onto the table, and opens it flat.

Plastic wallets. Ferry times printed off in March, with the crossings on a Tuesday highlighted in yellow because Tuesday was cheapest. A paint chart with three greens circled and one of them circled twice. A page torn out of a magazine about growing things in salt wind. A hand written note in the margin of the second page that says September, with an exclamation mark after it, in her own handwriting, from a night when she could not sleep for being pleased.

None of it exists now. Not one page. There was a phone call on Thursday and by the end of the phone call the next five years were gone, and everything in that binder became what it is now, which is thirty sheets of paper about a life that is not going to happen.

Her friend does the kindest thing anybody has done all week, which is to look at the folder rather than at her, and say nothing at all for a while.

And what sits under the table with the bag, unsayable, is this. She is not only grieving the coast and the green paint and the ferry. She has lost the thing a plan quietly does for a person: it tells you there is a road. Take the road away and the ground itself feels different underfoot, and she has caught herself twice this week standing in a room with no idea what she came in for.

Nobody is going to tell you what it was for

Let me say what this article will not do, because the bracing for it costs energy that nobody in your week has spare.

It will not tell you what the shaking was for. Not refining, not pruning, not preparation, not a lesson, not a door closing so another one could open. I do not know why Thursday happened and neither does anybody else writing on the internet, and a reason handed to a person in your week is almost always a way of making the person handing it feel better.

It will not tell you that something better is coming. Nobody knows that either.

And it will not tell you that the folder was silly, or that you should not have got attached, or that a wiser person holds their plans more lightly. You planned. Planning is a good and ordinary thing a person does with a life, and being pleased about it was the right response, and the exclamation mark after September is evidence of nothing except that something good had come into view. There is no fault in that page.

What can be said is smaller and much older, and it is one line long. A man wrote it while he was being hunted, when his own next five years were nothing anybody could have drawn on paper.

But I trust in you, O Lord; I say, "You are my God." My times are in your hand.Psalm 31:14-15

My times are in your hand. Not my plan. Not my folder. My times: the whole span, the ordinary Tuesdays and the Thursday phone calls, the years that came out how he expected and the years that did not. The Holy Spirit does not hand you that line as poetry. He hands it over as the plain arrangement your life is actually under.

Take that as yours right now, at the table, with the binder open in front of you. You are held by God tonight, and what is ahead of you is in His hand and not in that bag. That is not my reassurance about how things will turn out, because I have none to give you. It is what Scripture says about where a life is kept, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a sentence like that hold weight in a person who cannot see three months ahead.

Something quiet and important sits in the difference between those two things. A plan is a picture of a road. A keeping is a hand on a person. You have lost the picture, and the picture mattered, and losing it is a real loss that deserves to be called one. But you were never being kept by the picture. You have been kept by the hand the entire time, and you were being kept in March, when the ferry times were printed and you had no idea you would ever need to know the difference. That is not sentiment about the past. Psalm 31:15 puts the whole span in His hand rather than the part you could see, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old man's line land in a garden center cafe as something about you.

And the keeping is not sized to five years. This is the part that arrives as relief once it stops sounding like a reduction. Jesus said the day has enough in it of its own without tomorrow's being carried in as well, and He said it as a kindness rather than a rebuke. You are given today, and today has a shape and a size and an end to it, and the grace for it is already in your hand. That is written down for you rather than felt out by me, and it is His Spirit who serves it to a person one day at a time. Tomorrow is being held somewhere else by Someone who does not need a folder.

So here is what is true while everything is still exactly as wrong as it was on Thursday. You have been kept, you are being kept, and the keeping never once depended on the accuracy of your picture. The word says the times are in His hand, and His Spirit is pressing it into you now, not as a promise about the coast, but as a fact about the ground.

And if this week has gone somewhere darker than sadness, if the thought of not being here has come and sat down with you, please tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line: 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number for where you live. Do that before anything else in this article. A shaken person needs a human being in the room, and reaching for one is not a small faith. It is the most sensible thing in the world.