It was not a decision. That is the part that has been hardest to explain to anybody who asks.
There was a Sunday in November when she did not go, and there was a reason, and it was a real reason. Then the next Sunday she did not go either, and there was a reason for that too, though a thinner one. By January there was no reason at all, and by February she had stopped needing one.
Four months. And in the whole of those four months, three people asked after her, two of them by text.
She has never blamed them for that. People are busy and she had been quiet for a long time before she left. But something happened in her during that winter that she has never said out loud, and it is this: she decided the quiet was God agreeing.
Letting her go. Politely, the way a place lets go of somebody who has stopped turning up. And she has organized the years since around that conclusion without ever once examining it.
If you have a season you wrote off like that, come and sit down. I am not going to tell you what God was doing in your winter, because I have no idea and neither does anybody.
What the quiet was not
Let us take the conclusion out of the middle of the room first, because everything since has been built on it.
Nobody ringing is a fact about a diary. It is a fact about tired people and a busy season and a hundred small human things, and it is not a message from God, and it never was.
The mistake was not leaving. The mistake was reading an absence of phone calls as a divine verdict, and once that is in place, every quiet week afterward confirms it.
You were not released. Nothing in those four months was God letting go of you, and nothing about them put you outside His reach. I am not saying it to be soothing. The written word says he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee (Hebrews 13:5), stated as a permanent arrangement rather than as a reward for attendance, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that hold across a winter when nobody rang.
The walk where they did not know Him
Here is what changed this for me, and it is not a reason to go back on Sunday.
There are two people walking away from a city after the worst weekend of their lives, and a stranger falls into step beside them, and they talk to him for seven miles.
And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight.Luke 24:31
The whole point of that account is what happens before the last verse. For seven miles they are walking with the risen Christ, telling Him about their own disappointment, and they do not know it is Him.
He was there for the entire walk. Their not knowing changed nothing about who was beside them.
You had somebody walking beside you through those four months, and not recognizing Him did not make Him absent. That is written down as the shape of the account itself, and the Holy Spirit sets that down in front of a woman who has read a quiet phone as a verdict for years.
The claim stops here
Now, something has to be said about what this article is not going to do, because bracing for it will have started around the second paragraph.
I am not going to tell you what God was doing in that winter. Not teaching you, not pruning you, not preparing you for something, not protecting you from the church you left. Anybody who says that is decorating a season they were not in.
You have one claim here and it is the whole of it: He was present. Nothing more is being added to your four months. Scripture says whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence (Psalm 139:7), which is a question with no available answer and it is asked about geography and about the dark alike, and the Holy Spirit, not the wording, is the one who was in that house on those Sunday mornings.
And if that winter left more behind than anybody knows, if sleep has gone, if the mornings 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.
So this is where it turns, and it is not a plan for going back, because that is between you and God and I am not going to arrange it.
God was in that place and you did not know it. He was near you on the worst Sunday of it, and nothing that happened in those four months put you outside His reach. The written word says if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there (Psalm 139:8), which is the most extreme address the psalmist could think of and it did not change the answer, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that true about your actual winter rather than about seasons in general.
I cannot tell you what God does next, or what Sunday looks like for you. Nobody honest can. What I can tell you is that the four months were not four months of being released, and that nobody ringing was never Him agreeing.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud in the kitchen, in your own voice. The standing to speak like this is yours in Christ, and it was never issued on the strength of your attendance. Scripture is the ground under it, the Holy Spirit is what makes it living rather than merely settled, and what God does about the years since, and when, is His, however He answers, and nothing on this page pretends to know.
- Winter I stopped going, you are four months of my life and you are not the season God let go of me. Hebrews 13 says He has said, I will never leave thee nor forsake thee, stated as an arrangement and not a reward for turning up, and the Holy Spirit held it right through those Sundays. In the name of Jesus I stop reading you as a release.
- Conclusion I came to when the phone did not ring, you were never spoken over me by God, and you are not running my next ten years. Psalm 139 asks where a person could go from His Spirit and gets no available answer, and His Spirit was in that house on every one of those mornings. I am naming the season out loud today instead of living off the verdict.
- Father, You were in that place and I did not know it, and Luke 24 has two people walking seven miles with You while their eyes were held. I thank You that Your Spirit never once mistook my absence from a building for absence from You. Here is the season by its name, out loud, and here is one sentence to You about it.
Luke 24:31
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
