The Dates in Next Year's Diary

The new diary arrives in August, and she has always liked that.

It comes flat and unbent, with a red ribbon sewn into the spine and a page at the front for addresses that nobody writes down any more. She makes a pot of tea. She sits at the kitchen table with the window open and the smell of somebody else's cut grass coming in, and she does the thing she has done every August since she was nineteen: she fills in the year ahead.

Birthdays first, in ink. Her mother's on the ninth of March. The car test. The week in September her sister always takes off.

Then she picks up the pencil.

She turns to the fourteenth of February and writes, very small, in the corner of the box, a set of initials and a time. Then the ninth of May. Then the eighth of August. Three faint marks in a clean new book, so light you would have to be looking for them to find them.

Three months apart. The rhythm she lived by for two years.

She was discharged in June.

She knows this. Nobody needs to tell her. She has the letter, and she has read the letter more times than she is ever going to admit to another living person, and the letter says what it says in a flat administrative font that she has tested from every angle for a hidden meaning and found none. There is no fourteenth of February. There is no appointment. Nobody is expecting her.

She wrote them in anyway. In pencil, which she would tell you is the entire point, because pencil rubs out, and if she is wrong she has lost nothing, and if she is right then the year is already shaped and she will not be caught out.

Then she shut the diary and put it in the drawer and has not thought about it since, apart from every day.

She has told nobody. Who would she tell. Everyone has been so pleased. Her sister cried on the phone. The woman at work said the word miracle and meant it kindly. What is she supposed to do, ring one of them and say: I am well, everything is well, I have simply booked three appointments with a hospital that has finished with me?

That is you, is it not.

Maybe not a diary. Maybe it is the reminder still sitting in your phone, or a number kept in your contacts under a name that drops your stomach when you scroll past it, or the fact that you cannot plan anything past the spring without leaving a gap in it big enough to reverse into. Nothing is wrong with you. You have simply kept a room ready for a guest who has been told, in writing, not to come.

Somebody else gave the rest

Let me start with the pencil, because the pencil is not the problem and I am not going to spend this message trying to prise it out of your hand.

What happened at that table is not superstition and it is not ingratitude. It is the last working habit of a person who spent two years staying ready, and it worked, and nothing in her has been told it may stop.

Deuteronomy 12:10 is a line spoken to a people who had lived out of bags for forty years. When they cross the river, God says, He will give them rest from all their enemies around them, and they will live in safety. Read the verbs and notice whose they are. You are not the one who has to manufacture the safety in your own house, and you have not been holding the year up with a pencil since June. That is the written promise, and the Holy Spirit is the one pressing it into a woman at a kitchen table in August.

But when you cross over the Jordan and live in the land that the Lord your God is giving you to inherit, and He gives you rest from all your enemies around you so that you live in safety.Deuteronomy 12:10

Notice that the rest arrives before anybody has learned how to use it. They had never lived in a house. Every skill they owned was a wilderness skill: strike camp, watch the horizon, keep the water in front of you, move at first light. Not one of those skills was any use in a kitchen, and God did not wait for them to acquire kitchen skills before He gave them the kitchen.

I have no standing to tell your body to stand down. I did not sit in those waiting rooms and I do not know what the letter cost you to open. Deuteronomy 12 has that standing, and His Spirit is the one who makes an old sentence land in a person's shoulders. You were not the wall around your own life. You were a woman keeping watch, and the watching was love, and it was never the thing holding the danger off.

I want to be careful with you here. I do not know what your next year holds and neither does anybody else, and you have had quite enough of people forecasting weather at you. If there are real dates in your diary, write them in ink and keep every single one. Nothing in this message moves you one inch away from the people who look after you, and if something worries you, you ring them, and you do it without apologizing for it. What I am talking about is the rota you're keeping in private, for an emergency that nobody has scheduled and nobody is expecting.

You have been told by people who love you that you must be so relieved. And you are, and you also stood at the sink in July holding a wet plate and could not name a single thing you felt. Scripture nowhere asks a person to be relieved on schedule. It says the rest is given by the One who brought them over, and the Spirit is not in a hurry with you, because He knows precisely why the pencil came out.

The word in that old sentence is around. Rest from the enemies around you. Not rest in a locked room with the curtains shut, but rest in a place with a horizon and a door you can leave open, which is a thing said about the outside of a life by the God who runs it. You have a house tonight with no watch being kept in it, and the Spirit is not asking you to prove you deserve the quiet before you are allowed to sit down in it.

That is not my optimism about your February. It is what the Spirit has been saying through Deuteronomy 12:10 since the day that letter came, and you have been filing it under things that are nice to hear. You were given the rest. It was not issued as a reward for coping well, and it is not withdrawn for being enjoyed too early.