Quiet Again For Eleven Months

They were all here yesterday and they will not all be here again until next year.

You have known that the whole time. It was sitting underneath the afternoon, in the same way it sits underneath every one of these: a low awareness that this is the one day, and that the one day is going past, and that at some point everybody puts their coats on.

And now it is the morning and there are eleven months in front of you.

Nobody will say that out loud. If you said it to any of them they would be hurt, because they are good people who are busy and far away and who do ring, and because it would sound like a reproach and you do not mean it as one.

So the number stays in your head, where it grows, and this morning it is the largest it gets all year.

Let me be honest about something before anything else, because I do not want to hand you a false comfort.

Eleven months is a long time and nothing I say here makes it shorter. I am not going to tell you that a phone call is the same as a house full of people, because it is not, and anybody who says so has not lived alone.

What I can tell you is that the eleven months are not one thing. They are not a single undifferentiated stretch of quiet. That is what they look like from this particular morning, and that view is produced by the morning rather than by the year.

God setteth the solitary in families

There is a line in a psalm about solitary people that is more concrete than it usually sounds.

God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains. (Psalm 68:6, King James Version)

Setteth. It is a placing word, and it is an active one, and the one doing it is God.

And what strikes me about it is that it is a present activity rather than a permanent arrangement. He sets. It is something He does, repeatedly, with solitary people, and the psalm lists it beside bringing prisoners out, which is also something that happens on particular days rather than in general.

That means the setting is not something that happened once when a family was formed. It goes on. It is a thing God is described as doing, in the present, with people who are on their own.

You are somebody God is described as actively placing, and it is written into Psalm 68:6 as a present activity rather than as a completed arrangement. The written word uses a verb rather than a state, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a fact about eleven months rather than about one afternoon a year.

And notice the word solitary. The psalm does not pretend the condition is not real.

You are named accurately in that verse rather than talked out of it, and Psalm 68:6 says solitary before it says anything else. Scripture states the condition plainly and then states what God does about it, and the Spirit of God is the one who does not require a woman to describe her year as fuller than it is.

What the morning does to the number

Now let me explain what is happening to your arithmetic, because it is doing you a specific injury.

From this morning, eleven months is one block. That is because it is being seen from one end, on the worst possible day to look down it, four minutes after the fullest day of the year ended in a hallway.

From inside it, it is not a block. It is about three hundred and thirty separate days, most of them entirely ordinary, some of them quite good, several of them containing another human being.

Those are two completely different objects and only one of them is real. The block is a trick of the vantage point, and the vantage point is this specific morning.

You are looking at a number from the one spot in the year where it is largest, and the written word puts God actively placing solitary people rather than leaving them in a block. Psalm 68:6 uses the present tense, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an eleven month figure apart into days.

And here is the thing that will actually help, which is not an attitude.

The eleven months are shaped by what is in them, and at the moment almost nothing is in them, because nothing has been put there. Not because nobody cares. Because nobody arranges anything in the days after that day, and then January comes and everybody is busy, and a year fills up with other people's arrangements.

A single thing placed in that stretch changes the shape of it more than any amount of feeling differently about it would.

You are able to put something into the year rather than wait for the year to bring it, and Scripture uses an active verb about the placing of solitary people. Psalm 68:6 has God setting rather than leaving, and the Spirit of God is the one who moves a woman from enduring a stretch to arranging inside it.

Put one thing in the calendar

So here is the assignment, and it is one date and it is today.

Put one thing in the calendar for the eleven months, and tell one person it is there.

Today, this morning, while the house is still full of yesterday. Not in a week when the feeling has faded, because in a week it will feel unnecessary and it will not get done and then it will be March.

One thing. A date in February. Somebody coming, or you going, or a thing you are attending, or a regular arrangement that starts.

You are able to put one date into an empty stretch, and it has never once required anybody to offer you anything first. Psalm 68:6 describes God as setting solitary people rather than as noting their condition, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman writing one thing in a calendar on the worst morning of the year.

And tell one person, because an intention that lives in your own calendar and nowhere else will move, and then move again, and then not happen.

I want to be exact about what this does and does not do. It does not fill eleven months. One date in February leaves a great deal of quiet on either side of it and I am not pretending otherwise.

What it does is break a block into two pieces, and a block that has been broken into two pieces is a completely different object to be standing at the start of.

You are breaking a block rather than filling a year, and the written word puts the setting in God's hands as something He is doing rather than something He did. Psalm 68:6 is present tense, and the Spirit of God is the one who is in the ordinary days that nobody has arranged anything for.