The Date You Have Moved Four Times

Nobody knows about the date. It is not in a diary. It has never been said out loud to a human being.

It lives in her head and it is very precise, which is how she does everything.

The first one was the end of the summer. Her reasoning was clean and she could still defend it: get through the summer, because summer is always thin, and then look at it properly in September when there is a normal week to look at it in.

September came. And what she thought was: this is not a normal week, and it would be dishonest to decide anything from a week like this. So she moved it to the end of the year. That felt right. A year is a proper unit. You can look at a whole year.

The year ended. She moved it to Easter, because there was the thing in February that she could not have walked away from and everybody knew it.

And two weeks ago, on a Tuesday, sitting in the car outside the place with fourteen minutes before she had to go in, she moved it to the summer again.

Which is where it started.

And that was the moment it stopped being about the decision.

Because she is a person who does what she says. She is the one who turns up. In eleven years she has been late twice and she could tell you the reasons for both. And she has now, four separate times, made an appointment with herself and not kept it.

The verdict landed in the car with fourteen minutes to go, and it was short: I do not actually want to know the answer.

And on top of that, a second one: which makes me a coward and a person who lets things drift, and I have thought of myself as neither of those things for my entire adult life.

Now that is you in the car, and you have known it was you since the fourth line.

Nobody here is going to hand you a deadline

Let me say what is not going to happen on this page, because you are braced for both of them.

Nobody here is going to talk you into staying. Not with encouragement, not with guilt, not with a story about somebody who nearly walked away and is grateful now. And nobody here is going to tell you to go. That is not mine to hand you, I do not know your years or your building, and both of those are just different ways of making a worn out woman carry a decision this morning.

And I am certainly not going to give you a fifth date. That is the last thing on earth you need from anybody.

There is no decision on this page. Set it down for twenty minutes. It will keep. It has kept four times.

There is nothing to do here either. No practice to sharpen, nothing to get up earlier for, no discipline to add. You are running on empty, and a suggestion is the last thing empty needs.

What I want to take off you is one specific weight, and it is not the moving of the date. It is what you concluded about your own character in a car park with fourteen minutes to go.

So let me tell you what those four dates actually were, because you have been reading them wrong.

They were not procrastination. Every single one of them had a real reason attached, and you gave the reason at the time, and the reason was true. Summer is thin. September was not a normal week. February happened and you could not have walked out of it. Those are not excuses. Those are accurate readings of a hard eleven months, made by somebody who reads situations accurately for a living.

You have not been avoiding the question, you have been protecting it from being answered by a woman who had nothing left, and that is not cowardice, it is care. It is written that He will not break a bruised reed or quench a faintly burning wick (Isaiah 42:3), and that is how God Himself handles somebody in your condition. It is the Holy Spirit, not this page, who takes a sentence about a bruised reed and sets it down beside a car park with fourteen minutes on the clock.

And now let me say something about the whole apparatus of the date, gently, because it is the real thing here.

You have been trying to schedule your own rescue.

That is what a deadline for a decision like this actually is. It is a person saying: by this date I will have enough clarity, enough energy and enough distance to see my own life properly. And then the date arrives and she does not have those things, because they are not the sort of thing that arrives because a month changed.

Clarity is not something you produce on a date you set, and God has never once made His guidance conditional on you organizing yourself into a position to receive it. It is written that if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him (James 1:5), and without reproach is in that sentence for people exactly like you. His Spirit is the one who makes that a real offer at a real hour rather than a verse to admire.

Now here is the psalm I want to leave with you, and it was written by somebody whose life was genuinely in the balance and who did not know how it was going to go.

But I trust in you, O Lord; I say, "You are my God." My times are in your hand.Psalm 31:14-15

My times are in your hand.

Not my decisions are made. Not my situation is resolved. Not I have set a date and I am keeping it. He is saying: the timing of this is not mine, and I am not the one holding it.

Your times are in His hand, and they were never in your diary, and the four dates you moved were never load bearing. It is written, my times are in your hand (Psalm 31:15), spoken by a man surrounded on every side with no resolution anywhere in sight. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and puts it into a woman's own car on a Tuesday.

And I need to say this next part plainly, because it matters more than anything else on this page. If any of this has traveled further than tiredness, if you have found yourself thinking that everybody would manage better without you in the world at all, please tell a human being today. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour. Anywhere else, your local crisis line or emergency number, and one person who knows your name and will sit with you. Being the woman who always turns up does not disqualify you from being the one who asks somebody to come.

You are not a coward and you are not a person who lets things drift, and heaven has never once passed that sentence on you. It is written that there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1), and now is the word in it, not later and not once you have finally kept an appointment with yourself. The Holy Spirit is the one who reads that over a woman with a notebook shut on her lap.