The Date I Gave Him

She remembers what day it is before her feet are on the floor.

Twenty to seven, August the ninth, and the house is quiet in the way a house is quiet in the summer when the window unit has cycled off. The screen door has dew on the inside of the mesh. Somewhere down the street a truck is idling, and out in the yard the sprinkler head that never seats right is ticking against the fence.

She makes coffee first, because she is not going to go get the journal before she has coffee.

Then she gets the journal. It has been in the drawer under the phone charger since about April. It is a drugstore journal, the kind with the elastic band and a cover that pretends to be leather, and she bought it in the first week of January in a checkout line, on purpose, with a plan.

Inside the front cover, in her own handwriting, in a pen that skipped once:

By August 9. Done. No more of this in me.

Underlined twice. And under the line, because she was in a good mood that morning and the church had just done a series on it, a small drawn smiley face.

She stands at her own kitchen counter in a bathrobe and reads that four or five times.

Because it is August the ninth. And she is exactly the same woman. Not worse. She would be honest and say not worse. But not one measurable inch of what she wrote down, and she wrote it down clear enough that there is no arguing with it now over coffee.

The worst part is not the failure. The worst part is that she can hear how it sounds. A grown woman handing God a due date on the inside cover of a five dollar notebook, with a smiley face. She feels the heat go up her neck standing there alone in her own kitchen, which is a particular kind of shame that only ever happens in an empty room.

She closes the journal. She thinks about throwing it away and does not. She puts it back in the drawer, and stands at the sink looking out at the sprinkler ticking against the fence, holding a cup of coffee she has not drunk any of.

And you know that morning. Maybe your date was Christmas, or your birthday, or the first of a year, or a Sunday you circled after a service that took the top of your head off. You gave God a deadline. You would never call it that out loud. But the date is real, you know exactly what it was, and either it has come and gone or it is coming, and you can already feel how the morning is going to go.

The date was never the sin

Let me get one thing out of the way before anything else, because she is standing in a kitchen with her neck hot and I am not going to let that sit.

Writing that date was not a sin. It was not presumption and it was not arrogance and it was not a lack of anything. It was want. A woman wanted, badly, to stop being a certain way, and she reached for the only instrument anybody ever handed her for wanting something badly, which is a calendar. That is what we are taught to do with a longing. Put a date on it, work backward, make it real.

And the wanting is not the problem. The wanting is one of the most honest things in that kitchen. God is not embarrassed by it and neither am I.

You are wanted by God more than you want this, and the ache that made you write a date came from somewhere holy. Philippians 2:13 says it is God who works in His people both to will and to do of His good pleasure, and it is His Spirit who put the wanting there before the pen ever moved.

The trouble is not the desire. It is that a calendar is a tool for work a person does, and the thing she wrote down is not work a person does.

Not by might, and not by August

There is a verse for a woman standing in front of a half finished thing, and it was spoken to a man looking at a half built temple, which is about as literal as this gets.

Then he answered and spake unto me, saying, This is the word of the LORD unto Zerubbabel, saying, Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts.Zechariah 4:6

Zerubbabel had the foundation laid and the work stalled and a nation watching. Everybody knew what was not finished. Everybody could see the outline of it from the road. And what God says to him is not a schedule and not a productivity note. It is a correction about the power source.

You are being changed by the Spirit of God and not by the force of your own resolve, and that was true through every month you were counting. Zechariah 4:6 puts it in exactly those words, might and power on one side and His Spirit on the other, and nothing in the verse depends on the man with the plans holding out.

Sit with what that does to a deadline. A deadline is a promise about output. It works when the one making it controls the labor. She does not control this labor and she never did, and the reason she never did is not a defect in her.

You have been trying to schedule something you were never given the levers for, and putting that down is not giving up on it. His word hands the building to the Spirit in that verse, and the same Spirit is the one doing the changing in her, which means the pace was never hers to set and the outcome was never hers to carry.

And notice what God does not say to Zerubbabel. He does not say by next spring. He does not say hold on a little longer. He gives him no horizon at all. He gives him a Person.

Who despised the day of small things

Two verses later there is a line I want in that kitchen with her.

For who hath despised the day of small things?Zechariah 4:10

It is a question with an edge on it. Somebody was looking at that construction site and calling it nothing, and God asks who exactly gave them permission. There is a way of looking at a small day that God flatly does not share, and a woman standing over a journal on August the ninth is doing it to herself.

You are in a day God is not despising, and the smallness of it is not what He sees when He looks at this kitchen. Zechariah 4:10 asks the question straight out, and it is the Spirit named two verses earlier who is doing the building on a day that looks like nothing.

And if this morning is heavier than a disappointing date, if the flatness has been sitting on her since spring and it is not lifting, let me say the plain thing plainly. A great deal of what God does, He does through people who have training and an appointment book, so bringing one of them in is Him at work and not a way around Him. A doctor, because sleep and thyroid and pain and grief set a soul's weather more than most preaching admits. A counselor, who will take this same subject up again in October and again in March and notice what nobody notices from inside her own kitchen. One friend holding the unabridged account of it rather than the porch version. And where the dark has gone further than disappointment, where staying has started to feel optional to her, 988 answers by call and by text at any hour, and so does any crisis line near her: make that the next thing that happens in this house, and have a person in the room before the coffee is cold. None of that is a swerve away from the subject. At twenty to seven on August the ninth it is the subject.

You were held through every month of that countdown, and you were never once building this alone. Scripture calls Him the God who is near to the brokenhearted, Psalm 34:18, and Helper is what Jesus called His Spirit, which is an undertaking He entered into and never an encouraging word about the one being helped.