Everybody has one. He would tell you that, and it is true, and it does not help him at all.
His was in a March about nine years ago and he can still tell you what day of the week each part of it happened on. What was said. Who said it. What he was holding when the phone went. The order of it has never blurred the way people promise you it will.
He got through it. That is the thing people mostly say about him, and he has learned to accept it without arguing.
What he has never said is that he went through the whole of that week without once feeling the presence of God, and that he has never been able to think about it as anything other than the week nobody came. Not people. People came. He means the other kind of coming.
And a man who has one week filed like that is carrying a small permanent question about every other week, whether he knows it or not.
If you have got a week like that, come and sit on the step. Nothing about yours is going to be explained here, and nothing about it is going to be reframed for you.
Feeling was never the instrument
Let us take the mechanism apart, because it has been running unexamined for nine years.
The reasoning goes: I felt nothing, therefore nothing was there. And that reasoning works fine for a smell of gas or a draught under a door, and it fails completely for a Person, because a person's presence in a room has never depended on somebody else's capacity to register it that day.
And the capacity to register anything in the worst week of a life is close to zero. That is not a failure of faith. It is what a body does under that kind of load.
You were not abandoned in that week. Nothing you failed to feel was God failing to be there, and nothing that happened put you outside His reach. I am not saying it to be gentle. The written word says the LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit (Psalm 34:18), which locates His nearness precisely where a man's instruments have stopped working, and it is the Holy Spirit, and He is the one who makes that hold in a March that has never blurred.
The hour He came, and what they thought He was
Here is what steadied me on this, and it is not an invitation to reinterpret your week.
There is a boat on a lake in the dark, and the men in it have been rowing against the wind for hours, and He comes to them.
And in the fourth watch of the night Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea.Matthew 14:25
The fourth watch is three in the morning to six. They had been out there most of the night. And when He finally comes into view, the record says they cried out for fear, because they thought He was a ghost.
Sit with that. He was there, and they could see something, and what they concluded was that it was the worst possible news.
You had Him in the dark of that week, and misreading what was there is not the same as nothing being there. That is written down in exactly that order, and it is the Holy Spirit who puts that in the hands of a man who has been certain about a March for nine years.
Nothing is being added to your week
Something has to be said very plainly, because this is where the sentences usually start arriving.
I am not going to tell you what that week was for. Not a refining, not a preparation, not something allowed for a greater good you cannot see yet. Every one of those turns a man's worst seven days into an item in somebody else's argument, and the person making the argument was not holding the phone.
You have one claim in this article and it is the whole of it: He was there. Nothing more is being said about your March. Scripture says whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence (Psalm 139:7), asked as a question that gets no available answer, and the Holy Spirit is the one that was in that house on the worst day of the seven.
And if that week still costs more than anybody around you 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.
Now the turn, and it is not an explanation, and it is not a request to remember it differently.
God was in that place and you did not know it. He was near you on the worst day of that week, and nothing that happened there put you outside His reach. The written word says if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there (Psalm 139:8), which reaches for the most extreme address available and comes back with the same answer, and the Holy Spirit is what makes it true about your actual March rather than about hard weeks in general.
I cannot tell you why any of it happened. Nobody honest can, and anybody who has told you was guessing at your expense. What I can tell you is that the week you have filed as the one where nobody came was never that week, and that He came in the fourth watch to men who thought He was a ghost.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, in your own voice. The right to speak like this is yours in Christ, and it was never issued on the strength of how well you got through anything. The written word is the ground under it and the Holy Spirit is what keeps it living rather than merely durable, and what God does about that memory, and when, is His, in His own way and in His own time, and nothing on this page claims to know which.
- Worst week of my life, you are seven days I lived through and you are not the week God was not in the room. Matthew 14 has Him coming in the fourth watch to men who took one look and thought He was a ghost, and the Holy Spirit kept their misreading in the record beside His arrival. In the name of Jesus I stop treating you as evidence.
- Reasoning that says I felt nothing so nothing was there, you are a sentence God did not say, and you are not sitting on this step tomorrow. Psalm 34 puts His nearness exactly where a man's instruments have stopped working, and His Spirit was in that house on the worst day of the seven. I am saying the month and the year out loud tonight.
- Father, if I make my bed in the lowest place there is, behold, You are there, and Psalm 139 asked the most extreme question it could and got no exception back. I thank You that Your Spirit never once required me to feel Him in order to have been with me. Here is the week by its date, out loud, and here is one sentence to You about it.
Matthew 14:25
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