This Year Is Not The Year For All Of It

Something happened this year and the house has not got back up.

It might be an illness, or a job, or a person who left, or a stretch of months that nobody outside would call a catastrophe and that has taken more out of your household than a catastrophe would have.

Whatever it was, it is not finished, and the day is coming, and the day assumes a household with more in it than yours currently has.

And you have not told anybody.

That is the part I want to look at, because it is the only part that is still in your hands. You cannot undo the year. You can decide when the people coming find out that it is going to be different.

At the moment the plan, such as it is, is that they find out on the day. Not deliberately. It is just that no message has been sent, and time is passing, and the message gets harder to send every week it is not sent.

Let me say the first thing plainly. A season is a real thing and it does not need anybody's agreement to be happening. What has gone on in your house this year is a fact about your house, and it is not a failure of hospitality and it is not something to be apologized for.

To every thing there is a season

There is a line at the top of a chapter that people usually read at funerals, and it belongs to a man in November as much as anywhere.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. (Ecclesiastes 3:1, King James Version)

To every thing. Every one of them, including the ones nobody would choose. The chapter that follows lists them in pairs, and about half of the pairs are hard: a time to weep, a time to lose, a time to keep silence, a time to refrain from embracing.

Those are in the list as legitimate times. Not as failures of the good times. As seasons in their own right, with their own place under heaven.

Which means the year your household has had is a season and not a verdict, and the day that falls inside it is a day inside that season and not an exception to it.

You are inside a season that Scripture names as legitimate, and it is written into Ecclesiastes 3:1 that every purpose has its time under heaven. The written word puts the hard pairs in the same list as the good ones, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a fact a man can act on rather than a line read out at gravesides.

And notice what the verse does not do.

You were never asked to make this season look like a different one, and Ecclesiastes 3:1 assigns each thing its own time rather than blending them. Scripture keeps the seasons distinct, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a man stop trying to produce a season he is not in.

What the silence is buying

Now let me be exact about what happens if nobody is told.

They arrive expecting the usual. That is not unreasonable of them: it is what has happened every other year and nobody has said anything.

And then they walk into a house that is doing a reduced version, with a household in it that is visibly not at full strength, and they have to work it out in real time, at the door, with their coats on.

What follows is a whole afternoon of adjustment. People being careful. Somebody asking the wrong question because they have no information. Somebody else deciding, on the strength of nothing, that they are not welcome. And you, on the day, on top of everything else, doing the explaining you did not do in November, to several people, in a hallway, one at a time.

You have been storing up an afternoon of explaining, and Scripture treats each season as a real thing with its own time rather than as something to be managed on arrival. Ecclesiastes 3:1 puts every purpose in its own time, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a man decides to tell people in advance.

And here is the second thing, which matters more. A household that says nothing is a household nobody can help.

There may be two people on that list who would come earlier, or bring something, or take a whole part of it off you, and who will not, because they do not know there is anything to take. Their hands are empty because nobody told them.

You have been keeping a room full of willing people uninformed, and the written word never once asks a man to carry a season privately. Ecclesiastes 3:1 names the time as real, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody about to send a message he has been not sending since September.

Say it in November

So here is the assignment, and it is a message rather than a conversation.

Tell the people who are coming, in November, that it is a smaller one this year.

Not the whole story. There is no obligation to give an account of what has happened in that household, and several of them do not need one.

Something like: it has been a hard year here and this one is going to be a smaller and quieter day than usual, and we would still love to see you.

You are able to say it is a smaller year without giving an account of it, and it has never once required you to explain what happened. Ecclesiastes 3:1 names the season without asking anybody to justify being in it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man typing a short message in November.

Three elements only. It has been hard. The day will be smaller. Come anyway.

And send it early. Early is the whole difference. A message in November is information, and people arrive already adjusted, with their expectations set, sometimes with something in their hands. The same information on the day is a scene in a hallway.

You are turning a hallway scene into a short message, and it has never once required the year to have been different. The written word puts every purpose in its own time, and the Spirit of God is the one who carries what a man sends before anybody sets off.