The Months When The Page Said Nothing

The notebook is a hardback one with a green cover, and she has kept it for eleven years, and it stops in February.

That is not a metaphor. There is an entry dated the ninth of February and then thirty one blank pages and then the back cover. She keeps it on the window seat with the Bible on top of it, in the same place, and she still sits down there at half past six most mornings, because she is not the kind of person who stops doing a thing simply because it has stopped working.

For eleven years she has read in that seat and written down what came. Not devotional thoughts. She was never sentimental about it. Usually one line: a phrase that stood up off the page, a name that came to mind while she was reading, once just the words ask him about his father, which she did, and which turned out to matter enormously to a man she had known for six years.

And then in February it went quiet, and it has stayed quiet since, and it is now the far side of summer.

She still reads. Every morning, the same seat, the same light coming up over the wall. She has been through Luke and most of the minor prophets and she can tell you what is in them. The words go in as words. They arrange themselves into sentences and the sentences have meanings and she understands the meanings perfectly well, the way you understand a train timetable.

Nothing stands up. Nothing turns and looks at her. Four months.

She has not told anybody, and here is the reason, and it is worth saying because it is the actual wound. She is afraid that if she says it out loud somebody will suggest something. A different translation. A different time of day. A plan. And she cannot bear the thought of being handed a technique, because she has understood for a while now that this is not a technique problem, and being offered one would mean the other person had not heard her.

What she has concluded instead, privately, is worse. She has concluded that the quiet is a verdict. That something in her has closed, or something in Him has, and that either way the notebook is an accurate instrument and it has stopped recording because there is nothing to record.

A man talking to his own soul

Psalm 42 is the psalm people quote the first line of and then leave. Read the middle of it. It is one of the loneliest things in Scripture and it is in the book on purpose.

A man is remembering how he used to go with the crowd to the house of God, with the voice of joy and praise, and he is not there now. His tears have been his food day and night. And he does something in that psalm that people do only when nothing is answering them: he starts talking to himself. Why art thou cast down, O my soul. He says it twice, because the first time it did not take.

And in the middle of all that, this:

Yet the LORD will command his lovingkindness in the daytime, and in the night his song shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of my life.Psalm 42:8

His song shall be with me in the night.

Not: I will hear it. Not: it will lift me. With me. Present in the room, going on, whether or not the man lying in the dark can pick it out.

So hear this over you at half past six. That silence is not absence. Not one morning of it. That is not my comfort for you; it is what His word says is happening in exactly that kind of quiet, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who takes a line like that and makes it something a person can lean their weight on.

Now watch what that does to February.

If Scripture reading is a transaction, then a silent month is a failed transaction and the fault lies with one of the two parties, and since you cannot fault God you have quietly been faulting yourself. That is the whole of the reasoning, and it has been running for four months without ever being said out loud. The Holy Spirit is what turns a sentence that is true into a sentence that is true about you.

But the psalm will not let that stand. The man in it is not being punished. He is not in sin, he is not being corrected, and God does not appear at any point to explain the silence. What the psalm gives him instead is one thing: the assurance that the song is with him in the night, which is exactly the thing he cannot hear.

Which means the silence is not the measurement. You have never been out of it. That is not sentiment. Scripture says the song is present in the night, and the Holy Spirit has been the one carrying it in a woman who has been sitting in a window seat reading Habakkuk and hearing nothing, morning after morning, and turning up anyway.

And I want you to notice the turning up, because you have not counted it once.

For four months, with nothing coming back, you have gone to that seat. That is not a person whose faith has gone quiet. That is a person doing in the dark exactly what they did in the light, which is the only definition of faithfulness the Bible has any interest in, and God has been watching every single morning of it with a fondness you would find hard to believe.

You are not further away than you were in January. Not by an inch. His word never once measures nearness by what a person can feel, and the Holy Spirit does not withdraw from a room and leave the reading to run on by itself while nobody is looking.

Let me say one thing plainly here, because this is written for somebody running low. If the quiet has gone somewhere darker lately, if there have been mornings in that seat with thoughts you would not repeat to a soul, please do not hold that on your own. In the United States you can call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one real human being who can sit with you today. That is not a failure of devotion. That is a person doing what the psalmist did, which is saying the true thing out loud where somebody can hear it, and God is the one who wrote that psalm down and kept it.