A Year Where Nothing Moved

You are up before the house again, because you always are, and the kettle is the loudest thing in the world at this hour.

Coat over the pajamas. Boots by the back door with yesterday's mud still on them. Out to the gate with the mug, because the gate is where you go, and the lane is doing what it does in the half light, which is very little. There is a bird somewhere in the hedge sorting out its own business. The field beyond has been that field all your life.

And the thought that has been arriving for a few weeks arrives again.

It has been a year.

Not a bad year. That is the part that makes it hard to say out loud to anybody. Nothing collapsed. Nobody died. There was no disaster to point at and no rescue to be glad about. It was a year of ordinary weeks, one after another, with the same request in the middle of it that was there at the start, sitting exactly where it was, unmoved, like the field.

You found the notebook a fortnight ago, looking for something else entirely. Your own handwriting, twice, thirteen months apart. Two entries. Almost the same words, and one of them is a word you had forgotten you used to use. And you stood there in the kitchen with the drawer still open and could not decide what you were looking at: a man being faithful, or a man in a rut with better handwriting.

Here is the bit that is yours.

It is not the waiting. You are better at waiting than you give yourself credit for, and you have proved that over and over in ways nobody has ever noticed. It is that you have no name for what the year was.

If it was faithfulness, you would have expected to feel something like it. Something with a bit of iron in it. Something you could recognize on a Wednesday. Mostly it felt like Tuesdays. It felt like getting the bins out and doing the shopping and turning up, and saying the same eleven words at the same point in the evening, and getting up and doing it again.

And a person cannot congratulate themselves for a year that felt like that. So it goes unnamed. And a thing that goes unnamed for long enough starts, very quietly, to feel like nothing at all.

That is what this one is about, and I am not going to hurry it.

From inside, the two look identical

Let me say the true thing first, because it is a relief and almost nobody says it.

From the inside of a year, endurance and mere elapsed time look exactly the same. There is no sensation attached to one that is missing from the other. Nobody living through a long stretch of holding on has ever been able to tell, in the middle of it, which of the two they were doing, and the reason is not that they lacked discernment. It is that the difference is not the kind of thing a person can read off their own week.

We test it by feeling, because feeling is the only instrument we carry about with us. And feeling was never built to measure this. Feeling reports on sleep and daylight and whether the thing at work got sorted. It does not report on whether a man is being held.

You are not being asked to feel it. Romans 5:5 says the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit given to us, and poured out is a completed act rather than a mood that visits, and the Holy Spirit is the one who did the pouring and is not waiting on your Wednesday to confirm it. The pouring was not conditional on the year going well.

Look at what Paul does just before that line, because he lays out an order and the order matters.

He says that tribulation works patience, and patience works experience, and experience works hope. The word behind patience there is not the sort of patience that waits calmly in a queue. It means remaining under something. Staying in place while weight is on you. That is the whole content of it. Not thriving under it, not glowing under it, not learning a valuable lesson about oneself under it. Remaining.

You have been doing the very thing Scripture names, and you did not recognize it because it has no shine on it. His word calls remaining under the load the beginning of the whole sequence, and there is no clause anywhere requiring the one who remains to feel remarkable while doing it, and the Spirit is the one who holds a person in place through a year of Tuesdays. Bins out, shopping done, turning up: that is what remaining actually looks like from the inside.

And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given unto us.Romans 5:5

Hope does not embarrass the one who keeps it

Now the sentence that answers what has never once been said to anybody.

Hope maketh not ashamed. Sit with the word ashamed, because Paul did not choose it casually and it is not the word we would have reached for. He is not saying hope is pleasant. He is saying hope will not leave you looking a fool.

That is the fear, is it not. Not that the thing you want is wrong. That after this long, still wanting it has begun to feel slightly embarrassing, like being the last person at a party who has not noticed the room emptying. You have started saying it more quietly. You add a little qualifier to the end of it now, so nobody thinks you are naive, and so that if the answer never comes you will have at least been sensible about it in advance.

You are not a fool for still wanting it. Scripture says plainly that hope does not put a person to shame, and it grounds that not in the likelihood of the outcome but in the love already poured in, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a want from curdling into either fantasy or bitterness. The wanting is not the flaw in you.

And now I have to be careful with you, because the easiest thing in the world at this point would be to promise you something.

I am not going to tell you that the coming year is different. Nobody who loves you should tell you that. I do not know it, Scripture does not say it, and if I handed it to you as a promise it would become one more thing for you to carry, and one more account for God to settle that He never opened. Hope in the New Testament is never optimism about circumstances. It is a settled expectation fixed on a Person, and the reason it does not embarrass anybody is that it is not fastened to the calendar at all.

You have been given the one thing hope actually runs on. It is written that the love of God has been shed abroad in your heart, past tense and already done, and the Holy Spirit who was given to you is named in that same verse as the one who did it. Hope is not something you generate at the gate at first light. It is the overflow of something already poured in.