The Year You Wrote Off

There is a year she does not talk about, and it is not the one everybody thinks.

People assume it is the year of the funeral. It is not. It is the eleven months afterwards, when the cards stopped and the casseroles stopped and everybody quite reasonably went back to their own lives, and she got up every day and did what had to be done and could not have told you one single thing about God in the whole of it.

She was not angry with Him. She has met angry and it was not that. It was flatter and worse: she assumed, without ever deciding it, that she had been left to get through that stretch on her own, and that whatever God was doing that year, it was elsewhere.

And here is the odd thing she noticed years later. She could not go back and look at that year. Not would not. Could not. Her mind would skate off it the way your tongue avoids a tooth. Nine years on she could tell you what happened in it but not what it was like, because she had filed the whole stretch under a single heading and then never opened the file.

The heading was: I was on my own for that.

If you have a year like that, come and sit with me. I am going to make one claim about it, and I am not going to go one inch past it.

I am not going to tell you what God was doing

Let me be careful in the first minute, because this subject gets handled badly more than almost any other.

I am not going to tell you what God was up to in that year. I do not know. I am not going to tell you it was building something in you, or preparing you for something, or that you will see it one day, or that it was a gift with a hard wrapping on it.

And I am certainly not going to tell you He sent it. He did not need your worst eleven months in order to get anything done, and a God who arranges a year like that to teach a lesson is not the God who is actually in the book.

You were not abandoned in it, and you were not being managed through it either. That is not me smoothing it over: the written word says I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee (Hebrews 13:5), which is a promise with no year excepted from it and no fine print underneath, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that hold in a woman who cannot make herself look at a particular stretch of her own life.

One claim. That is what this page is for. He was there. Not what for. Not why. There.

The man who slept through it

There is a night in Genesis that exists for people exactly like you.

Jacob is running. He has made a mess that cannot be tidied, he is going somewhere he does not want to go, and he stops because the sun goes down rather than because he has arrived anywhere. He takes a stone for a pillow, which is the detail that tells you the whole of it, and he sleeps.

And the sky opens over him while he is unconscious. Not because he prayed. Not because he had got anything right. He was, by any reading, the least deserving he had ever been, and he was asleep, and the ladder went up from the exact patch of ground he had lain down on.

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 sentence.

God was in that year and you did not know it, and not knowing it did not make Him less present. That is written into the story on purpose, that the man's ignorance and God's presence sat in the same square of ground all night, and the Spirit is the one who makes that land in a memory you have been skating off for nine years.

Notice what the text does not do. It does not tell Jacob what the year was for. It tells him who was in it. That is the whole revelation, and it was enough to make him build something on the spot.

Why you cannot look at it

There is a reason a year like that becomes a file you never open, and it is not spiritual failure on your part.

You closed it because you had to keep functioning. That is not weakness, it is how people survive stretches like that, and it worked, and it cost you something: the year got sealed with the wrong label on it, and the label has been the only thing you have seen since.

You are allowed to go back and look, and He is not waiting there with a correction for you. 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), and nigh is a word about proximity in the actual moment, and it is the Holy Spirit who goes back into that year with you rather than sending you in alone.

And if going back stirs more than you expected, that is ordinary and it is not a failure. Grief that has been sealed for years can come up hard when the seal goes. Please tell somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a bereavement service, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight. That is not stepping outside God's care. It is one of the ways He keeps people.