The Date He Wrote On The Calendar In Pen

He wrote it in pen because pencil is for guessing.

That was the actual reasoning, and he remembers thinking it while he did it, standing at the kitchen wall on a Sunday afternoon with the calendar hanging over the kettle. He found the square, and he wrote the word in capitals, and he underlined it.

Then, at the table, with everyone eating and his mother passing the bread down, he stood up and told them.

Not I think. Not maybe. He said that God had shown him, and he said the date, and he said it in the voice a man uses when he wants his family to have something solid to lean on.

There were fourteen people at that table. His brother looked up. His daughter put her fork down. His mother said God is good, in the way she says it, and everybody carried on eating, and something in the room had shifted, because he had gone and put a date on it and now they were all in.

The seventeenth came.

He got up early for it. He shaved. He is not embarrassed about that part and he will not pretend to be.

And the day went by, and it was a Tuesday, and it was completely ordinary, and at ten at night he was standing in the kitchen holding a cup he had not filled, looking at his own handwriting.

Here is the part nobody warns you about.

The month had fourteen days left in it.

So the square stayed on the wall, over the kettle, at eye level, for another two weeks. He looked at it every morning. He could have taken the calendar down. He did not take the calendar down, because taking it down would have been an announcement too, and he had made enough announcements.

Nobody in the family ever said a word about it. Not one word, not once, and that has been harder than any argument would have been.

If you have a square on a wall somewhere, or whatever your version of it is, pull a chair up. The coffee is already made.

The psalm that admits the fainting

There is a psalm most people quote from the second half, because the second half is the brave part. The first half is the one that will help you tonight.

I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord.Psalm 27:13-14

Read that first sentence again slowly, because it is an admission.

He is saying he came close to going under. Not that he sailed through it, not that his confidence never wobbled. He is saying there was a version of that season in which he did not make it, and the only thing standing between him and it was believing he would see God's goodness while he was still alive.

Still alive. In the land of the living. Not in some settled account afterward.

You are a man who believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living, and that is the exact sentence the psalm honors. Psalm 27:13 keeps the fainting in the line rather than tidying it out, and it is the Holy Spirit who preserved the admission standing right beside the courage, so a man in a kitchen at ten at night holding an empty cup is standing inside a verse and not outside one.

What was wrong, said once, and then we move

Something was wrong. Let us not be delicate about it, because being delicate about it is what your family has been doing for two weeks and it is making it worse.

The date was wrong.

That is the entire list.

Your believing was not wrong. Your wanting your family to have something solid under them was not wrong. Standing up at that table was not wrong, and it was brave, and you are the only one at it who did. The date was wrong, and the date was the one part of the whole thing that was never yours to issue.

You have a faith that is fully intact and a calendar entry that was never given to you to write. The word is direct about it in Acts 1:7, where the times and the seasons are held in the Father's own power, and the Spirit who carries that verse has never handed the pen to a man at a kitchen wall, which means what failed on the seventeenth was an ink mark and not a believer.

Timing, not faith. Say it until it goes in. Timing, not faith.

The two weeks of looking at it

Now the square, because the square is the real problem and everybody has been treating it as decoration.

Every morning for fourteen mornings you have made coffee under your own handwriting. That is not nothing. That is a slow, daily, private reading of a sentence that says you were sure and you were wrong, in your own capitals, underlined.

You are not being read that way by the One who was in the kitchen with you all fourteen mornings. Lamentations 3:23 says His mercies are new every morning and great is His faithfulness, and it is written into a book by a man watching a city burn, so the newness is not a mood, and the Spirit who brings a mercy into a room at six in the morning has been arriving under that calendar every day since the seventeenth.

He has been in there with you. Every single one of those mornings. You thought you were alone with the square.