The Morning After You Were Wrong

In October of 1844 a great many people in America went to bed on a Tuesday and got up on a Wednesday.

That sentence is the whole disaster and it does not sound like one, so stay with it.

They had believed, with everything in them, that the Lord was coming back on a particular day. They had not held it privately. They had told their neighbors, their families, the men they worked beside. Some of them had settled their affairs. Some had let a harvest stand because there did not seem to be much point in a harvest. They had spent months being laughed at in the newspapers for it and had gone on saying it anyway, because they were not cynics, they were people who loved Him and wanted Him and had done their sums with a full heart.

And then the day came, and they waited through it, in their houses and their fields, in ordinary clothes.

And it passed.

And the next morning the cows still needed milking.

That is the part nobody writes hymns about. Not the waiting, which is at least dramatic. The Wednesday. Getting up in a house where everybody knows, and putting your boots on, and going out to animals that have no idea anything has happened, and doing the same four jobs you did on Monday, in front of the same neighbors, with your face.

I will not have anybody mocked on this page for that day. Not one of them. They were wrong about an hour and they were not wrong about wanting Him, and a person who has never once been wrong about God has probably never once expected anything from Him.

And you know that Wednesday.

Yours might be smaller and it will not feel smaller. You told the prayer meeting. You told your sister. You said it at work, out loud, in a voice that was steadier than you felt: God is going to do this, I know it, watch. And you named it, because vague faith did not seem like faith. And you set a rough date on it in your own head, because hope does that without asking permission.

And it did not come. And the next morning you had to get up and be a person with a face, in the same building, with the same people, who all remembered.

That is the room you are in. Not the disappointment. The morning after it.

The word for a set meeting

There is a prophet who stood on a wall complaining, and God answered him, and the answer is one of the strangest kindnesses in Scripture because it does not explain anything.

He does not tell Habakkuk why. He tells him what to do with the gap.

For the vision is yet for an appointed time. It hastens toward the end and it will not lie. Though it tarries, wait for it, for it will surely come, and it will not delay.Habakkuk 2:3

Now hold two words in that line, because they are doing all the work.

The first is appointed time. In Hebrew it is the word used for the set feasts, the fixed meetings, the days that were written into the calendar of God before anybody arrived to keep them. It is not a vague someday. It is a diary entry in a hand that is not yours, and you have never been shown the page. The Holy Spirit is the one who kept that particular word in the verse rather than a vaguer one, so what you were reaching for was a fixed meeting in a book you were never handed.

The second is tarries.

God says the word Himself. Out of His own mouth, in the same breath as the promise: this may take longer than you think. Which means a promise that has not arrived on the day you expected is not a promise that has failed. It is a promise doing exactly what He said it might do, in front of a person who was never given the diary.

And that puts the whole of your Wednesday in a completely different place.

You were not wrong about God, and the date was never once in your possession to get right. You were wrong about a day, and He never handed you the page it was written on, and He is not standing over you this morning with your own sums in His hand. Habakkuk 2:3 puts the appointed time in God's own keeping and says out of His own mouth that it may tarry, and it is the Holy Spirit who preserved both halves of that sentence together, which means a morning that came and went is a promise doing what He said it might do.

I am not going to tell you why it did not happen. I do not know, and nobody writing on this site knows, and anyone who arrives at your door with a tidy reason for it is offering you a burden dressed as an answer. Habakkuk did not get a reason. He got an appointed time he could not see and a God who does not lie, and he wrote it down, and he stayed.

That is what is available to you today. Not an explanation. A distinction.

Your timing failed. Your faith did not.