The Season I Got Through By Not Thinking

Her method was simple and it worked, which is why she has never revisited it.

She got through by not looking. Not denial exactly, and not pretending to anybody that things were fine. She simply declined to turn her head. There was a great deal to be done and she did it, and when the thing came near she found something to do with her hands, and eventually it stopped coming near as often.

Two years like that. And she came out the other side of it upright and functioning, and people told her she was strong, and she took that as confirmation that the method was sound.

Here is what she has noticed lately, and it has taken twenty years to arrive. She never asked God where He was in any of it. Not once. Not angrily, not sadly, not at all. She got through a whole season without ever bringing it up with Him, and now it sits in her history like a room in a house she owns and does not go into.

If you have a season like that, come and sit down on the step. Nobody is going to ask you to open anything today.

The method was not a sin

Let us settle this before anything else, because the modern instinct is to call not looking a failure and it is not.

Some things cannot be looked at while a person is carrying them. Turning the head away is one of the ways a body survives, and it kept a woman upright through two years, and that is not something to repent of. It is something to thank God for having been available.

The cost is only this: the room got shut, and rooms that get shut stay shut on their own for a long time afterward.

You are not standing under a judgement for the way you got through. Nothing about not looking has ever changed where God was, and nothing that happened in there put you outside His reach. I am not saying it to be soothing. The written word says he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust (Psalm 103:14), which is God accounting for what a person can actually bear rather than being disappointed by the limits, and it is the Holy Spirit, and He is the one who makes that hold on a porch twenty years on.

The man who found out afterward

Here is what steadied me, and it is not a nudge to go into the room.

There is a man asleep outdoors on a stone, running from a family disaster he caused himself, and the sky opens over him and there is a ladder with traffic on it. And when he wakes up, the first thing out of his mouth is not about the ladder.

And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not.Genesis 28:16

And I knew it not. That is the whole sentence for a woman with a shut room in her house. He was not paying attention. He was not looking for God, and he had no expectation of finding Him in that particular field, and he was asleep for the entire event.

The knowing came later. The presence came first and did not wait for the knowing.

You were in a place He was already in, and the Word records a man discovering it afterward with no penalty for having missed it at the time. That is written down as his own sentence about his own night, and it is the Holy Spirit who lands it in a woman who never once asked.

Nothing is being required of you

Something must be said very plainly, because this is where a page usually starts assigning homework.

Nobody is asking you to go into the room. Not today, not on any timetable, and certainly not because a website suggested it. If that ever happens it happens with somebody safe and it happens slowly, and it is not what is being asked for here.

You have one claim in this article and it is the whole of it: He was there. Nothing further is being asked and nothing about the two years is being interpreted. Scripture says whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence (Psalm 139:7), which is asked as a question and gets no answer anywhere, and the Holy Spirit is the one that was in the season she declined to look at.

And if that room still costs more than anybody around this porch knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.