The Calendar Went Blank in April

It is the big paper kind, two years across, taped to the wall beside the refrigerator where the light switch is, so that she looks at it about forty times a day whether she means to or not.

She did it in orange highlighter, back in the fall, at this table, with a cup of tea going cold at her elbow. Every other Thursday, all the way down the page and over into the next year. She remembers being pleased with how it looked. There is a certain satisfaction in a grid that goes somewhere, and she is the sort of woman who feels it.

Around the orange there is everything that was hung on it. Her daughter's graduation in June. The week they were going to be at her brother's. A start date in September in her own handwriting with a box drawn around it. Two years of a life, laid out and load bearing.

The last orange mark is April fourteenth.

After April fourteenth the squares are white. Not crossed out. Not erased. Just white, the way a calendar is white before anybody writes on it, running on across the wall through a summer and a fall and a whole spring that she now has no information about at all.

She has been standing in front of it since the kettle boiled.

The strange part is that she is not crying. She has done that. What she is doing is something closer to accounting. Her eyes keep going back to the seam, that Thursday to the Thursday that is not there, as if looking at it again from a slightly different angle will make the second one appear. It is nine minutes now. The tea is cold again. She has not moved.

That is you, in front of the calendar.

Maybe yours is on a wall and maybe it is on a phone. Maybe it was a build, or a course, or a pregnancy, or a job with a start date, or a house you had the closing date for, or a season of life you had already told people about. However it came, one conversation happened and now there is a seam in your life where the next two years used to be, and you keep going back to look at it.

I will say two things and then I will stop and stay a while.

The first is that this is a real loss of a real thing. Plans are not vanity. A grid on a wall is somebody loving her family out loud in orange highlighter, and what came down was not a fantasy. It was a life you were building.

The second is that I am not going to tell you why it happened, and I am not going to tell you that something better is coming. I do not know either of those, and the people offering you both this week meant it kindly. I would rather sit here with you in front of the white squares than hand you something I made up.

What a wall can hold

There is one line in the Psalms that has been doing quiet work in people in your position for about three thousand years, and it is worth reading slowly, because it is easy to hear it as a scolding and it is not one.

The counsel of the LORD stands forever, the plans of his heart to all generations.Psalm 33:11

Take the verb first. Stands. It is the plain word for something that has taken its stand and is still on its feet. Not hovers, not intends, not hopes. Stands, in the way a chimney stands after everything built around it has come down.

And then look at where it stands. Not on a wall. Not on a grid. Not in a September start date in your own handwriting with a box drawn around it. The counsel of the LORD is not written in the medium your calendar is written in, which is why nothing that happened to your calendar could reach it.

You have a future that was never being held by that piece of paper, and the piece of paper coming down did not touch it. Psalm 33:11 puts the standing thing in God's counsel and not in anybody's arrangements, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a floor rather than a phrase for a woman looking at a seam between two Thursdays.

I want to be careful here, because this is exactly the place where people get told something cruel in a gentle voice.

Nobody is saying your grid was foolish. Nobody is saying you should have held it loosely, or that you had it in the wrong place, or that it came down to teach you something about where your security was. I do not know why it came down. What I know is what the psalm actually says, which is not a word about your plans and every word about His.

You were not being kept by your arrangements even in the years when the arrangements were working. What is written puts the keeping in the counsel of the LORD across all generations, well past any horizon a person can see from a kitchen, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that stop being an idea and start being a thing to stand on.

Then there is the range on it. To all generations. Your planner ran two years, and that is a good long way for a woman with a family and a job to be looking. The sentence in front of you runs out past your grandchildren.

You are inside a plan whose horizon is generations, and April is not the edge of anything except your visibility. Psalm 33:11 measures in generations rather than in quarters, and it is His Spirit who lets a woman feel the size of that on the day she cannot see as far as next Thursday.

The difference between a road and a view

Here is the distinction I would most like to leave with you.

Losing the view is not the same event as losing the road. They feel identical from the kitchen. They are not the same thing at all.

What went white on the wall is the view. What you could see. What you could tell people about, and picture at night, and count on the way you count on stairs being where stairs were last time. That is gone, and it is a genuine bereavement, and you are allowed to grieve a thing you cannot photograph.

You were never able to see the road, in any year of your life, and the years it felt like you could were the years the view happened to agree with it. The written word puts the standing counsel outside human sight entirely, and the same Spirit who has been keeping you through every hour you could not account for is not newly stretched by a blank spring.

You have a keeping that does not require you to see the road to be on it. That is not a nice thought I am offering you: Psalm 33:11 makes the plans of God's own heart the enduring thing rather than the plans of anybody's household, and His Spirit is what makes an unseen thing steady under a foot. Here is a picture of it.