The Shed Calendar With Nothing Past March

The calendar comes free from the feed merchant every December, and it hangs on a nail by the shed door on a loop of orange baler twine.

Hugh has hung one there for twenty six years. Same nail. A picture of a tractor on the top half, the months on the bottom, and a pencil on a string beside it, because a biro will not write in a cold shed.

Look at this year's.

January is full. February is full. March has something in every square and two things written sideways up the margin. And then, on the first of April, it stops.

Not tapers. Stops. Twelve squares of April, blank. Thirty one of May, blank. All the way down to the tractor picture at the bottom of December.

For three years that calendar was a rescue timetable. The meeting on the ninth. The valuation. The date the thing had to be in by, underlined twice, and the day after it left empty on purpose, because he did not know what would be on the other side. Cover crop in, because the ground would not hold. The vet. The other meeting.

He worked that calendar the way a man bails a boat, and he was good at it. Ask anyone in the parish. When it was bad, Hugh was the man you wanted in your yard, because he could look at a wall of trouble and tell you what got done first, what waited, and what did not matter at all, and he was nearly always right.

It came through. In October it came through, properly, and there is a gate at the end of that lane which swings the way it always did, and it is his gate.

And now he stands in front of the calendar with the pencil in his hand and cannot put a mark on April.

It is not that there is nothing to do. There is plenty. There is a hedge that has wanted laying since his father's time. There is a lad down the road who has asked him twice about coming up to give a hand. There is a wife who mentioned, once, in the summer, that they had never once seen the sea in June.

He knows how to work a year that is a rescue. He has no idea in the world how to work a year that is just a year.

So he puts the pencil back on the string and goes to do something to the mower.

Here is where Hugh goes back to his shed, because you have already stood in front of your own version of that wall.

It might not be a calendar. It might be a Sunday afternoon with nothing in it that you fill with jobs you invented on the walk out to the yard. It might be that somebody asked what you would like to do this year and you could not answer them, and it went quiet, and you made a joke.

The rescue ended. The rescuer is still standing there with his sleeves rolled up.

A year that is not a rescue

I want to name the thing you're not saying, because it sounds ridiculous out loud and it is not ridiculous at all.

The emergency suited you better.

That is not a shameful thought and it does not need confessing. A man who is good in a crisis got good at it, and getting good at it cost him something. What nobody mentions afterwards is that the skill has a shape, and the shape only fits one kind of year.

So who says an ordinary April is a real year at all? Ecclesiastes 3 says so, and it says it in a list. A time to plant and a time to uproot. A time to break down and a time to build up. A time to weep and a time to laugh. You are standing inside one of those right now, named and appointed and no less a season for having no drama in it, and the Spirit of God did not lose interest in you the week the drama went out.

I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be glad and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil: this is God's gift to humanity.Ecclesiastes 3:12 and 13

Watch what Solomon does with his own list. He lays out the seasons, war and peace, tearing and sewing, keeping and throwing away, and then he stops sorting them and says the thing that actually matters. There is nothing better than to be glad and to do good, and to eat and drink and take some pleasure in the work.

And then he calls that a gift. Not a wage. Not something handed over at the end of a hard run to the ones who held out. A gift, given to a man in whatever season he happens to be standing in, and given first.

Ecclesiastes 3:11 sits just before it and carries the weight of the whole thing: He has made everything beautiful in its time. Not eventually. In its time. You have a season on you that God is willing to call beautiful while it is still ordinary and still quiet, and it is His Spirit, not your feeling about it, that makes the word stick.

That is worth standing still for, because an ordinary April does not announce itself. It has no urgency in it to tell a man he matters. Which is exactly why it has to be said to him from outside.

You are not being asked for a plan for the rest of your life by Sunday. You are being handed one square. Eat, do good, take some pleasure in the work of your own hands, today. The Spirit is the one pressing that on a man standing in a cold shed with a pencil in his fingers, and the ground under it is Ecclesiastes 3:13.

One square is not a small offer. It is the size of the thing a man can actually take hold of. Nobody eats a year.

Somewhere along the road it got put about that the quiet season is the reward for the hard one. Scripture does not talk that way, and the Holy Spirit will not preach it to you, because it would make your April depend on how well you handled your March. Psalm 16:6 turns it the other way round: the measuring lines have fallen for me in pleasant places. Fallen. You were given boundary lines you did not set, and they are exactly where you are standing this morning.