It Was Not One Big Thing

Everybody else on this site has a year with a name on it.

The year of the baby. The year of the illness. The year somebody died. And you have read those and something in you has gone quiet, because you do not have one, and the absence of one has become the whole problem.

If there is no event, then there is no reason. And if there is no reason, then the only remaining explanation is what kind of person you are.

I want to argue with that, hard, because I think it is one of the loneliest positions a person can be in.

What you have instead of an event is a stretch. Two years, maybe three, where nothing in particular happened and everything was slightly too heavy. Work was fine and draining. Nobody was ill. Nothing collapsed. You got up, and got through, and got up, and the days had a flat quality that you could not have described to a doctor or a friend without it sounding like nothing.

And underneath that, quietly, everything optional stopped. The house is optional in the sense that nobody notices for a long time. So the house stopped.

There was no month where it went. That is why you cannot find one. It went at the rate of about one percent a month for thirty months, which is a rate no human being can see.

He requested for himself that he might die

There is a passage in Kings about a man who had just had the biggest day of his life and then went and sat down under a tree.

But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree: and he requested for himself that he might die. (1 Kings 19:4, King James Version)

Elijah. The day before, fire from heaven. And then this.

Now here is what I want you to see, because it is the whole reason this passage is in the Bible for you.

You have been carrying a load nobody brought food for, and the absence of witnesses has never once made a cost smaller. The Spirit of God is the one who counts what no neighbor came round about, and 1 Kings 19:4 puts a man under a tree with no explanation offered anywhere in the chapter.

Read what God does about it. There is no rebuke. There is no reminder of the fire. There is no what is wrong with you, look what you just did.

An angel touches him and tells him to eat. Then he sleeps. Then the angel touches him again and tells him to eat again, because the journey is too great for him.

Food, sleep, food, sleep. That is the divine response to a man flattened by something that had no name in the text at all.

You are not without a reason, and 1 Kings 19:4 has never once required a person to produce an event before their exhaustion is taken seriously. It is written that the answer was bread and sleep and a second helping of both, and the Holy Spirit is the one who treats a flat, storyless tiredness as real.

You have been disqualifying yourself for lack of a headline. The word records a man under a tree with no explanation given anywhere in the chapter, and the Spirit of God is the one who meets what is actually there rather than what would make a good account of it.

A slow year is still a year that took something

Here is the thing about flat stretches that makes them worse than dramatic ones, and I want it said plainly.

A dramatic year comes with witnesses. People bring food. They ask after the family. They remember it happened. And when a house goes during a year like that, there is a public record that something occurred. A house is a record of what a season cost, and it is not a verdict on the person living in it.

A flat stretch has no witnesses at all. Nobody brings a casserole because your Tuesdays are heavy. And so the same amount of capacity goes missing, over a longer period, with nobody, including you, ever recording that anything took place.

That is why you have no month. Not because nothing happened. Because it happened at a speed and in a shape that leaves no mark on a calendar.

You were never lacking a cause, and a cost spread thin over thirty months has never once been smaller than the same cost in one week. 1 Kings 19:4 has a man under a tree with no cause named and no cause demanded, and the Spirit of God is the one who does not require a story before He brings bread.

So tonight, instead of a month, we are going to write a stretch. That is a legitimate answer.

You are permitted to name a season that had no event in it, and naming it that way has never once made it less true. It is written that the journey was too great for him, which is a statement about a load and not about a man, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a flat year count as a real one.

Write down the stretch

So here is what I am asking, and it takes a pen.

Write down roughly when the flat stretch began. A season is fine. The autumn two years ago. Some time after the move.

Underneath, describe what those months were actually like. Not what happened, because nothing happened. What they were like. Heavy. Repetitive. Nobody near. Getting up and getting through.

Then read it back and let it be a reason.

Nothing gets cleaned tonight.

You are able to write a true description of an ordinary stretch, and it has never once needed a dramatic event in it to be worth writing. 1 Kings 19:4 records the tree and the request and offers no explanation at all, and the Spirit of God is present at a table with a pen exactly as He is in the middle of a crisis.