The Week In August, Three Years Running

The first year there was a row about it, which he now understands was the healthy year.

That was three summers ago. Something came up in the second week of August, a real something, the kind nobody could have foreseen and nobody could have handed to anybody else, and he canceled the week.

There was a proper argument in the kitchen. His wife said things she had been saving, and he said some things back, and it was loud and it was honest and it ended with both of them at the table at midnight being about eighty percent reasonable, and they went to bed and it was over.

The second year it happened again. Different reason, equally real.

That time there was no argument. There was a pause of about four seconds and then she said, right, and then she asked whether he wanted the chicken or the fish, because it was six o'clock and she had been in the middle of making dinner.

The third year, which is this year, he did not have to cancel it, because it had never been booked.

Nobody decided not to book it. There was no conversation where anybody said we will not bother this year. It simply did not get booked, by anybody, at any point, and it was July before he noticed and by then it was too late and the not-noticing was the thing, not the too-late.

Here is the detail that he keeps going back to. There is a calendar in that kitchen, the paper kind, and for years his daughter used to write things on it in her own hand, weeks ahead, in capital letters, with exclamation marks. AUGUST!! HOLIDAY!! She is sixteen now and she still writes things on it. Her exams went on it in February. A concert in April.

August has nothing on it and has had nothing on it for three years.

He stood in front of that calendar in the spring with a cup of tea and understood that a family adjusts its expectations quietly and without announcing it, and that the adjustment is what a cost actually looks like from the outside.

A hunted man and a diary

Psalm 31 gets quoted for its middle. It is worth knowing where the man was standing when he wrote it, because it changes what the sentence weighs.

He is being hunted. He says so in the psalm: fear was on every side, they took counsel together against me, they devised to take away my life. This is not a man with a manageable schedule. This is a man whose next month is entirely in the hands of people trying to kill him.

And out of that comes one of the flattest, steadiest sentences in the book.

My times are in thy hand: deliver me from the hand of mine enemies.Psalm 31:15

Times. Plural. It is not a word about the future in general. It is about the portions of a life, the seasons and the appointments and the intervals, the actual chunks a life is made of.

He hands them over. All of them. From a position of having no control over a single one of them.

So hear this, standing in front of a paper calendar with a cup of tea: your Augusts are held. That is not my sentiment; it is what His word has a hunted man doing with a diary he could not control, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes a plural noun like that and makes it something a man can put weight on in a kitchen.

Now let me be honest about the cost, because you have been trying to talk yourself out of it and it will not work.

Three Augusts are gone. They were real weeks with real things in them that did not happen, and your daughter is sixteen, which means there are not very many Augusts left in the shape they used to be. Nothing about the verse undoes that arithmetic and I am not going to pretend it does.

It is a genuine loss and you are allowed to call it one. Scripture never once asks a man to file a cost as nothing, and the Holy Spirit is not requiring you to be philosophical about a calendar with three blank Augusts on it.

But look at what the psalm does with the loss, because it does something specific.

It does not say my times are fine. It does not say the enemies are not really there. It says the times are in a hand, which is a statement about custody and not about outcome. David is not claiming he will get the year he wanted. He is saying that the portions of his life have an owner, and that the owner is not the men outside.

Which means the three Augusts are not simply gone into nothing. They are in the same hand everything else is in. And whatever those weeks would have held, the One holding them is not careless and is not a stranger to what a family loses.

You are not the custodian of your own family's seasons. That is a job you have been failing at because it was never yours, and the failure has been eating you for three years. His word puts the times in God's hand explicitly and does not leave a corner of them in yours, and the Holy Spirit is not standing beside a calendar counting what you did not manage to protect.

You may bless them tonight and hand the Augusts over. Not promise them one. Hand them over.