Time Passing Gave Nobody The Right To Hurry Me

Something changed at the year.

Not in you. In them.

For the first twelve months everybody was careful. Nobody mentioned anything. People brought things round and did not ask questions and there was a general unspoken agreement about how to be with you.

And then the anniversary went past, and within about six weeks the tone shifted.

Nothing dramatic. A sentence here. A slightly different way of asking. A comment from a brother in law about how it might be good for you to make a start on the room. All of it gentle, all of it well meant, and all of it carrying an assumption that was not there in month eleven.

The assumption is that the year was a gate.

Somewhere in the general understanding of these things, twelve months got established as a reasonable period, and once you are through it a different set of expectations applies.

Nobody in your family decided that. They absorbed it the same way everybody does. And they are applying it to you now, kindly, in small increments, and it has made month fourteen harder than month nine.

He made a mourning and nobody shortened it

There is a record in Genesis of the mourning for Jacob, and the striking thing about it is the arithmetic.

And he came to the threshingfloor of Atad, and there they mourned with a great and very sore lamentation: and he made a mourning for his father seven days. (Genesis 50:10, King James Version)

Seven days at that place, and that is on top of seventy days of mourning in Egypt before they ever set out.

Nobody shortens it. There is no point at which somebody suggests that the arrangements are becoming excessive. The number is simply recorded, as what happened, and the narrative treats it as right.

You are inside your own mourning, and a year going past has never once transferred the clock to anybody else. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a man who noticed the tone change at fourteen months, and Genesis 50:10 records a mourning at length and lets it stand.

And notice who decides the length in that account.

Joseph does. He made a mourning for his father seven days. The grieving man sets it, carries it out, and the whole company waits with him, and there is no committee anywhere in the chapter.

You are the one who sets the length of it, and that has never once been a thing anybody else could set for you. The written word puts the deciding in the hand of the one who lost somebody, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a man who has felt the room change since the spring.

Why a year is not a gate

Let me say something about the year, because it is worth dismantling.

Twelve months is a lap of the calendar. That is the entire basis of it. There is nothing in a lap of a calendar that corresponds to anything inside a person.

What actually happens in the first year is that you go through every occasion once. The first birthday, the first Christmas, the first time the clocks change. The year is a circuit of firsts, and getting round it is genuinely something.

But the end of a circuit of firsts is not a gate. It is the point at which you begin doing all of them for the second time, which for a lot of people is harder and nobody expects it.

You are entering the second circuit and never coming out of a gate, and the second one has never once been easier by arrangement. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a man for whom month fourteen is harder than month nine, and Genesis 50:10 counts days without treating any number as a threshold.

And here is what to do about the people, which is less than you think.

Nothing. They are not wrong people. They absorbed a common idea and are applying it warmly, and not one of them would continue if they understood what it costs.

You do not have to correct them and you do not have to educate anybody. The only thing that needs to change is that you stop measuring yourself by their calendar, and that happens inside you and costs them nothing.

You are able to put down their calendar without saying one word to anybody, and putting it down has never once required a conversation. The written word leaves the length of a mourning with the one who is mourning, and the Spirit of God is the one who steadies a man who loves every person who has been hurrying him.

One door, and no anniversary

So here is today, and there is no date in it at all.

Open the door of the room. Look. Close it again.

You are doing something that has no relation to any calendar, and nothing today has ever once been measurable against a year. The Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man standing outside a closed door, and Genesis 50:10 counts the days of a mourning without making any of them a deadline.

And notice what today is not.

It is not a start. It is not month fourteen making progress. It is one door, opened and closed, with nothing on either side of it, and it would be exactly the same act in month three or month forty.

You are doing something that would be the same in any month, and no month has ever once made it more or less appropriate. The written word puts the deciding with the grieving man, and the Spirit of God is the one present with a man who has stopped counting from a date in the spring.