October and Nothing Since

He can name the month, which he thinks is unusual and which he has never mentioned to anybody.

October. Not a particular day, but that month, and he knows because he remembers being aware of it at the time, in the truck, on the road out past the Hollis place, thinking that something had gone quiet and expecting it to come back the way things do.

It is fourteen months later.

He has kept everything up. That is the part he would want said. He has not stopped anything. He reads in the morning at the same time he has read in the morning for twenty two years. He is in the same seat on Sundays. He prays with his wife at night and he means the words and there is nothing false in any of it.

And there has been nothing in it since October.

He is not angry about it. He has looked for the anger and it is not there. He is not doubting anything either, which he finds strange, because he assumed a stretch like this would come with questions and it has come with none at all. He believes exactly what he believed in September.

He has just been walking through a house with the power off, doing everything correctly in the dark, for fourteen months.

The sentence, unsaid: nothing is wrong and nothing is on.

You may know that month. The one you can name, and everything since.

As prepared as the morning

There is a line in Hosea about how God comes, and it uses two of the most ordinary things there are.

Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the Lord: his going forth is prepared as the morning; and he shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter and former rain unto the earth.Hosea 6:3

Two comparisons. The morning, and the rain.

Take the morning first, because it is the stronger of the two. Sunrise is not a mood. It does not consult the person waiting for it. It does not arrive faster for the ones who are eager or later for the ones who are flat, and its arrival tells you nothing whatever about the character of the man standing in the yard.

You are waiting on something as prepared as a sunrise, and Hosea 6:3 compares the going forth of God to the morning rather than to a response He decides on, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who takes a line from a short and difficult prophet and lands it on a man in a truck on a road he has driven all his life.

Former and latter

Now the rain, and specifically the two rains, because Hosea names them separately and a farmer will hear it.

The former rain came in the fall and softened the ground so seed could go in. The latter came in the spring and filled the grain out before harvest. Two different rains, months apart, and the year needed both, and there was a long dry stretch in between when nothing was falling and nothing was wrong.

That gap is not a failure of the year. It is part of the shape of the year. Anybody who farms knows a season where nothing is coming and everything is fine, and the knowing does not make the waiting comfortable.

You are inside a gap that the calendar has room for, because the written word names two rains with a dry stretch between them and calls the whole arrangement normal, and the Spirit of God is what turns an agricultural detail into something a man can hold in the fourteenth month.

And notice the first clause, which is the one he has been quietly living. If we follow on. That is a phrase about continuing, and continuing is exactly what he has been doing at the same time every morning for twenty two years, in the dark, with the power off.

You have been doing the thing that verse actually asks for, and Hosea 6 puts following on in front of the promise rather than feeling something, and the same Spirit who spoke through that prophet is the one who fills.

Where the load is bigger than one man

I want to stop and say something plainly, because this site will not praise anybody for absorbing what one person cannot absorb.

Fourteen months of nothing, kept entirely to himself, on top of running a place, is a real weight even when nothing is wrong, and saying so is not a complaint. Tell a doctor plainly about the fourteen months, in those words, because a sustained flatness with no sadness attached is worth a real conversation and is frequently physical. Ask about a counselor, or a pastor he trusts who is not in his own congregation, so that saying it does not become news. And tell his wife, tonight, in the same plain words he would use about a fence, because they pray together every night and she does not know.

And if the flatness has begun going somewhere heavier, or the thought of not being here has started to feel restful rather than frightening, dial or text 988 in the United States, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and talk to a person tonight.

Telling her is not a burden on anybody. You are held exactly as much on the night you say it as on the fourteen months you did not, because Hosea 6:3 makes the coming as certain as a sunrise regardless of the state of the man waiting, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that true in the body rather than only in a comparison.