She Will Not Plan Past Friday

The message came in at seven forty this morning while the toast was under the grill.

Sarah. Lovely Sarah, who has known her since school and has no idea she is doing anything except being kind. Little Theo is being christened on the fourteenth of June and we would love you there, and there is a photograph attached of a baby in a hat that is far too big for him.

She reads it twice with the butter knife still in her hand.

Then she types: "We would love to." Then she looks at it. Then she deletes it, one letter at a time, all the way back.

Then she types: "Can I let you know nearer the time?" and sends that, and puts the phone face down on the counter, and gets the toast out from under the grill before it goes too far.

June is four months away.

Here is what her week looks like. Monday to Friday is full. Dentist, a shift swap, somebody's leaving do she has half agreed to, the car in for the thing with the wheel. It is a normal, busy, functioning week and she is doing all of it properly.

And then after Friday the calendar is white. All of it. There is nothing in the whole rest of the year, and it is not because she has nothing on. It is because she does not put anything in it any more.

She noticed it in the supermarket a fortnight ago, in front of the rice. She was holding the big bag and she put it back and took the small one, and she stood there for a second wondering why, and then she knew why, and then she went and paid.

It has been eight weeks since the thing happened. The worst of it, everybody agrees, has passed. And she is standing in her kitchen at seven forty in the morning with her shoulders somewhere up near her ears, waiting.

That is you.

Maybe your version is the holiday you will not book. The dress you will not buy for a wedding. The way you have started saying probably instead of yes, to everybody, about everything, and how tired that is making you.

Two things, before we go any further.

Nobody is going to tell you the bracing is a lack of faith. It is not. It is what a body does after it has been hit once and was not expecting it, and it is intelligent, not faithless. And nobody is going to tell you it is over, either. I do not know whether it is over. I am not going to stand on a page and decide that on your behalf, because you are the one who has to live in the answer.

Stability is a thing given to your times

There is a line in Isaiah written to people who were between two disasters, which is a very specific place to be standing, and it is exactly where this morning has left you.

And wisdom and knowledge shall be the stability of thy times, and strength of salvation: the fear of the LORD is his treasure.Isaiah 33:6

Read the middle of it slowly. The stability of thy times.

Not the stability of your nerve. Not the stability of your outlook, your mood, your composure at seven forty in the morning with a butter knife in your hand. Your times. The seasons themselves are the thing being stabilized, and the stabilizing is being done by somebody who is not you.

You are not the one responsible for holding your own year steady, and you were never given that job. Isaiah 33:6 puts the stability into the times and names God as the one who supplies it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land in a person as rest rather than as information.

Now look at what the passage does not do. It does not tell those people that nothing else is coming. Isaiah is not in the business of promising quiet centuries. He tells them where the steadiness lives while the century does whatever it is going to do.

You have an anchor that is not a forecast, and it is holding this morning whether or not the year behaves. That is what Scripture means by calling hope an anchor of the soul, sure and steadfast, and going into the place behind the curtain (Hebrews 6:19), and the Spirit of God is described as the guarantee on it, given now, in advance of anything being settled.

And there is that last phrase. The fear of the Lord is his treasure.

You have been given something to hold that nothing on your calendar can devalue. The written word makes reverence itself the treasure rather than the outcome of any particular year, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts that treasure in a person and keeps it there through a week that goes badly.

Nobody is calling the bracing a failure

Let me be very plain here, because a version of this conversation has probably already come at you from somebody who meant well and got it wrong.

The flinch is not sin. The white calendar is not backsliding. The small bag of rice is not a spiritual problem, and no one who has actually been hit hard would ever describe it that way.

What the bracing is, is expensive. It costs you Sarah's christening. It costs you the sentence you actually wanted to send at seven forty this morning. It is not wrong, and it is not free, and both of those are true at once.

You are not being told off, and there is nothing here to repent of. Romans 8:1 says there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, which covers the braced and the unbraced alike, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does His work in a person gently rather than by making them feel caught.

And the thing underneath the flinch, the quiet arithmetic that says if I plan it I am asking for it. Let us take that out and look at it in the light.

You are not able to summon a disaster by putting a christening in a calendar, and you never had that power. Scripture says our times are in His hand (Psalm 31:15), which is a statement about who is holding the diary, and the Spirit of God has never once been described as reacting to a person's optimism.

You were held through the eight weeks you have just come through, all of them, including the ones you cannot really remember. The written word says He upholds all who fall and raises all who are bowed down (Psalm 145:14), and the same Spirit who did that quietly behind you is not going to be introduced to whatever comes next as a stranger.