By the End of Term

Somebody wrote 41 in the corner of the whiteboard in red, and nobody has erased it since Tuesday.

Late April, the good part of the afternoon, and she has the windows open because the building's air conditioning has two settings and both are wrong. Third year Spanish. There is a tub of quizzes on the desk she is supposed to be returning, and a hoodie on the fence outside that has been there since the weekend and is now, she assumes, communal property.

She is cleaning out her planner, which is the ritual of the last stretch: the dead field trip forms, the seating charts for a class she stopped seating that way in November.

And taped inside the back cover, where it has been since the second week of August, is an index card in her own handwriting.

By the last day of school I want to be:

Three things under it. A person who does not check her email at ten at night. Someone calmer on the phone with her mother. A woman who prays before she opens the laptop instead of after, on the days she gets to it at all.

She reads it standing up, with the tape still holding one corner.

Not one. Not one of the three, and it is not close, and the strange thing is that it does not even feel like failure exactly. It feels more like reading somebody else's note. Whoever wrote that card in August was full of the smell of a new room and thirty unopened boxes of pencils and had absolutely no idea what February was going to be.

Forty-one days. She does the arithmetic before she can stop herself, and the arithmetic says forty-one, and something in her actually leans toward it, because forty-one is a number and a number can be worked with.

Then she catches herself doing the other thing, and this is what sits her down in the chair. She is already writing next August's card. In her head, in April, with pollen on the windshield. She is drafting the version she will tape in the back of the new planner, and she can hear exactly how it sounds, and it sounds like the one in her hand.

And you have your own card, whether or not it was ever written down. Yours has a date on it. New Year. Your birthday. The end of the school year, the end of the lease, the anniversary you are dreading. You know exactly what you meant to be by then, and you can hear how it sounds when you say it out loud, which is why you mostly do not say it out loud.

The card in August was not a mistake

Let me say the first thing plainly, because a page like this can very easily start by taking something away from you.

That card was not vanity, and it was not the wrong thing to want. A woman who writes down that she wants to be calmer on the phone with her mother has an accurate view of her own heart and a real love for an aging parent. Nothing about the wanting is the problem, and if anybody tells you the answer is to stop wanting to be different, close the book.

You are wanting the right thing, and the wanting itself was put in you rather than manufactured by you. Scripture says it is God who works in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure, so the appetite on that index card came from the same Spirit who is doing the changing, which means your August self was not being foolish. She was being moved.

Here is the only thing that went wrong, and it is one thing. A date got attached.

And a date does something specific to a work that is not yours. It quietly moves the whole thing onto your desk. You have been carrying a deadline for a job that was never assigned to you, and putting it down is not giving up on the change. The written word never once sets a term for what God is doing in a person; it describes travelers who go from strength to strength, and it is His Spirit who supplies each stage of that road, at the stage they are actually standing on.

From strength to strength has no dates in it

The verse under this whole page is one line out of a psalm about people walking to a festival.

They go from strength to strength, every one of them in Zion appeareth before God.Psalm 84:7

Look at the shape of that sentence. It describes travel, not a timetable. From strength to strength: it never says how long between the strengths, or how many, or when they arrive. It says the going has strength in it the whole way, which is a very different promise from the one on an index card.

And the verses just before it are where the psalm gets its heat. It talks about people passing through the valley of Baca, the valley of weeping, and making it a place of springs. Not skipping the valley. Not getting through it faster than the person ahead of them. Making a well in it, where they are, out of what is there.

You are on a road with water on it, and the water is issued at the stage you are on and not at the one you were aiming for. That is written into the psalm and I have not smuggled it in; the Spirit is the one who opens springs in a valley, and Isaiah says the same thing in almost the same words about rivers in a dry place.

Which means April has an allocation. Today has one. You have today's strength already, and you have never once been handed June's in advance. His word says His mercies are new every morning, morning being the unit the sentence chooses, and the Spirit who brings them has never yet arrived carrying somebody's calendar.

What today's degree is actually like

Now, the trap, and I want to name it before you fall into it in about four minutes, because I can feel you preparing to.

The temptation on a page like this is to convert all of it into a smaller plan. If not by June, then one degree a day, and let me work out what a degree is, and then let me check tonight whether I got one. That is the index card again in a lighter font. There is no schedule here to swap for the other schedule, and I am not going to hand you a smaller box to tick.

Today's degree is not a smaller version of the June list. It is a different currency, and it usually looks like this: a phone call with your mother that goes forty minutes and does not end the way those calls have ended for six years, and you do not notice until you are drying the dishes. A minute of quiet at the top of the day that you did not schedule and could not repeat on purpose.

You are already being given that today, and it does not depend on your recognizing it while it happens. Scripture puts the changing in the present continuous, from one degree of glory to another, and the same sentence hands the whole business to the Lord who is the Spirit rather than to the person keeping track.

And if the date on that card has turned from a hope into a weight, if April has started reading like a verdict, do not sit alone in a classroom with it. A person brought in beside you is not a substitute for God at work; more often than not it is God at work. A doctor, because exhaustion at this end of a school year is a medical reality, not a character flaw. A counselor. Your pastor, or the one friend who gets it without the summary. And if the evenings have started sliding somewhere below discouragement, if you have found yourself supposing the building would run smoother without you in it, reach a person today and not tomorrow: 988 answers by call or by text, or a crisis line near you, and somebody near enough to walk in and sit down with you. In a room like that one, that is the subject.