Every Deadline I Outlived

She is only up on the step stool because her granddaughter wants the recipe cards.

It is early, before six, and the light is coming across the field in that flat gray way it does before it decides to be gold. The coffee is made. The box she is after is on the top shelf of the hall closet behind a bag of Christmas bows, and it is heavier than she thought it would be, and she gets it down with both arms and sets it on the kitchen table.

The cards are in there. So is a church directory with a cover from a building they do not meet in anymore. So is a coupon organizer with nothing in it. And down at the bottom, under all of it, is a spiral notebook, blue, with the wire bent at one end the way they always got in a pocketbook.

She opens it because everybody opens them.

Inside the front cover, in her own handwriting, in ballpoint, pressed hard:

By my fiftieth. Patient. Not sharp with Dale. Prayer before my feet hit the floor.

She is seventy one. Dale has been gone six years this month.

She stands at the table in her housecoat with the box open and the light coming up, and she does the arithmetic without meaning to. Twenty one years past that date. And she knows, without turning a page, that this is not the only one. There was a card she wrote to herself in her forties. There was the New Year she told the Lord she meant it this time and underlined it twice. There was a whole season of getting up at five, which lasted about nine weeks.

She has outlived every deadline she ever set for herself.

And the part she would not say out loud, even now, even to the dog: she set another one on the way to this kitchen. She has been thinking that by Christmas, with the new baby coming and the house full, she would like to be somebody a little easier to be around.

She hears how it sounds. She is seventy one years old and she is still writing dates on the inside cover.

Maybe there is one in your head right now. A month. A birthday. A wedding. A number you would like to be different by, and you can hear exactly how it sounds too, and you would not say it out loud either.

The dates were never the enemy

Let me say something about that notebook before anybody makes fun of it, including you.

A woman who writes by my fiftieth on the inside cover of a notebook is not a fool. She is a woman who wanted to be kinder to her husband and knew it mattered and put it in ink. There is love in that page. There is more love in it than in the whole shelf of books she never got around to.

So I am not here to take the wanting away. The wanting is the Holy Spirit's fingerprints, and you would not want it out of you.

But look at what the date did once it was written. It quietly became the judge. Every year after the deadline, the page was not a hope anymore, it was a verdict, and every time she found that notebook it read like a bill she had failed to pay. You are not in arrears with God, and no page in a box has ever had the standing to say otherwise. That is what is written: there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, and it is the Spirit and not a calendar who says what is true about you at this table.

Nobody here is going to hand you another date. Not a better one, not a gentler one. That is the whole reason this shelf exists.

As thy days, so shall thy strength be

Now here is the sentence I brought you, and it is out of the last blessing Moses ever spoke, over a man named Asher who is about to walk into a life nobody has scouted for him.

Thy shoes shall be iron and brass; and as thy days, so shall thy strength be.Deuteronomy 33:25

Read how the strength arrives. As thy days. By the day. Not by the decade, not by the goal, not in a lump you could hold up and inspect and calculate against a deadline.

You have strength issued for today and it is already in the house. Deuteronomy 33:25 ties the supply to the day rather than to the distance, and it is His Spirit who does the issuing, so the fact that you cannot feel enough in you for the whole thing is not a problem, it is the design.

That is exactly how the manna worked in the desert. A day's worth. Try to hold a week of it and it turned in the jar. Israel was not being punished by that arrangement. They were being taught that the God who fed them was going to be there in the morning too, and the only way to learn that is to need Him in the morning.

You were never given a year's worth of anything, and the shortage you keep finding at the bottom of yourself is not a fault in you. The word promised strength for the day and named no other size, and the same Spirit who kept a nation fed one morning at a time has not changed the arrangement for a woman in a housecoat.

Today has a degree in it

So what about right now, this morning, with the box open.

There is a degree of change with today's date on it. Not a stage, not a level, and please hear me, not a score. Something small and real: one sentence not said, one call made that has been sitting there, one minute where the sharpness comes up and goes back down and nobody in the room even knows it happened. That is not a consolation prize for a woman who missed her deadline. That is how any of it has ever happened, in anybody, at any age.

You have today, and today is enough ground for God to work on. It is written that His mercies are new every morning, and the Spirit of God does that renewing in the dark before anybody is up, which is why this morning is not leftovers.

I am not going to tell you what you will be like at Christmas. I do not know, and neither does anybody who would tell you. What I know is what has been written down and what the Spirit does with it, and that is enough to stand a person up in a kitchen.

And a plain word here, in the middle where you can see it. If the arithmetic you did at that table this morning has been running for weeks, if that notebook is the sort of thing you go hunting for on purpose, get somebody into this with you. It is not a way of going around God. It is one of the plain, unremarkable ways He tends a person. A doctor, because grief and sleep and age all wear the same coat and any one of them may be doing the talking. A counselor able to sit with the whole box, not only the recipe cards. Your pastor. And if the early hours have started turning toward the notion that the family would carry on easier without you in it, call 988 this morning or text it rather than putting it off, or a crisis line near you, and have one person right there at that table with you.

You are not doing this on your own, and you were not doing it on your own through any of those twenty one years either. His word calls Him a very present help, and the Spirit whom Jesus sent is named the one who comes alongside, which is a description of a job and not a compliment.