October Is Already December

It is a bright cold morning in October and you are not here for it.

You are in a room three months from now. You are standing in a hallway that has not been built yet, holding a conversation that has not happened, with somebody who is at this moment going about their week with no idea that you are already in an argument with them.

This is the thing nobody has a word for, and I think that is part of why it has never been dealt with. Everybody understands dreading a day. Almost nobody talks about what it does to the months in front of it.

Because you do not just lose the day. You lose October, which is a good month, and most of November, which has its own quiet things in it, and you lose them to something that has not arrived and may not go the way your head is currently insisting it will go.

Three months a year. If this has been happening for ten years, that is two and a half years of your life spent in a room you were not in.

I want to say very clearly, before anything else, that this is not you being weak or morbid or ungrateful, and it is certainly not you failing at some spiritual discipline. A mind that runs ahead is a mind that has learned to run ahead, usually because at some point running ahead was the only thing that helped. It is a skill that outstayed its usefulness. It is not a character defect and I will not treat it as one.

But I do want you to have October back.

Why art thou cast down

There is a psalm where a man interrupts himself, and the interruption is the most useful thing in it.

Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance. (Psalm 42:5, King James Version)

Notice that he is talking to himself. Not about himself, and not to God about himself. He turns round and addresses his own soul directly, as though it were a separate thing in the room with him, and he asks it a question.

That is a very odd thing to do and it is in the Bible on purpose. It means a person is allowed to notice what their inside is doing and speak to it rather than simply be carried along by it. He does not silence it. He does not tell it to stop being disquieted. He asks it why, which is a different move altogether.

And the word disquieted is exactly right for what October is doing to you. Not grief. Not despair. Disquiet, which is a low continuous noise underneath everything.

You are permitted to turn round and ask your own mind what it is doing, and Scripture puts a man doing exactly that inside the prayer book of God's people. Psalm 42:5 does not correct the disquiet before it speaks to it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a thing you can actually do rather than a nice idea about self awareness.

That is the permission. Now the harder half.

You have a mind that has been running three months ahead without being asked a single question, and it is written into Psalm 42:5 that a person can put a question to their own soul out loud. The Spirit of God is the one who is present when somebody stops being carried by their own inside and starts speaking to it.

What a borrowed month costs

Let me be practical about what is actually being lost, because vagueness here helps nobody.

The loss is not enjoyment. That is the small part. What goes is time spent in the only month you can actually do anything in. December is not available to you. You cannot say anything to anybody in December from here, you cannot make one decision that lands in December, you cannot change one hour of it. The only month with any authority in it at all is this one, the one under your feet right now.

And you are spending it in a room where you have no authority, rehearsing a conversation that will almost certainly not happen the way you are rehearsing it. Look at the last three years honestly. How often did the thing you spent October dreading actually happen the way October said it would?

You were never given December to live in, and the written word puts a man's attention firmly in the day he is standing in rather than the one he fears. Psalm 42:5 has him speaking to his soul now, in the present, in the middle of the trouble, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings a person back into the day they are actually in.

And there is a second cost, which is worse and quieter. The rehearsing does not prepare you. That is the part that feels wrong, because it feels like preparation. It feels responsible. But rehearsal in the fog produces nothing you can use, because you cannot make a decision inside a scene you invented.

What produces something you can use is one true written line about the actual thing. Ten seconds of that is worth six weeks of the other.

You have never once been made better prepared by three months of rehearsing, and Scripture keeps its people asking real questions rather than imagined ones. Psalm 42:5 is a real question put to a real soul in real trouble, and the Spirit of God is the one who tells the difference between preparing and circling.

Getting the month back

So here is what I want to do, and it is small, because the small thing is the one that works.

Not: stop thinking about December. Nobody can do that and telling you to is the sort of advice that makes a person feel worse for failing at it.

Instead: put December on paper, once, in a line. Name what it is doing to your October.

Something like: December is taking my mornings and giving me a conversation with my sister that has not happened. Or: I am spending October in a hallway waiting for somebody to arrive.

You are able to hand your own mind a sentence instead of a fog, and Psalm 42:5 shows a man doing that in the middle of being genuinely cast down. The Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman at a table naming what her October is being spent on.

Here is why the line works. A fog cannot be answered, so your mind keeps re-running it looking for a handle. A sentence on paper has edges. Your mind can look at it, find nothing further to do with it tonight, and let go of it for an hour. Then two hours. That is how a month comes back: an hour at a time, not in one decision.

And I am not promising you a peaceful December. I have not the first idea what your December holds and neither has anybody else. What I am telling you is that October is real and it is yours and it is happening now, in bright cold light, whatever December turns out to be.

You were made for the day you are standing in, and it is written into Psalm 42:5 that hope is put in God rather than in a forecast of how the trouble ends. The Spirit of God is the one who holds a person steady in a present month without needing the future one settled first.