Somebody asked her when she gave up on it, and she could not answer, and the not being able to has bothered her ever since.
Not because she is embarrassed about giving up. She is fairly settled about that by now. It is that she has always been able to date things. She can tell you the week her mother got the diagnosis, and the afternoon she decided to leave her job, and the exact evening she knew about her marriage.
But this one has no day. There was hope, and then there was a long stretch of something in between that she could not have described at the time, and then there was no hope, and no particular Tuesday sits at any point on that line.
And what unsettles her is a suspicion that has grown out of it: that a thing with no date is a thing that happened without her permission. That she did not put it down. It drained, and she was standing right there, and she did not notice it going.
If you cannot name your day either, come and sit on the step. Nobody is going to ask you for a date here.
Slow is how it actually goes
Let us describe the mechanism accurately, because a person who cannot find a day starts inventing a fault instead.
Hope does not usually get renounced. It evaporates. It goes the way water goes out of a shallow dish in a warm room, which is to say invisibly, continuously, and with no moment where anybody could reasonably have intervened.
That is not weakness. It is what a long wait does, and the absence of a date is evidence of exactly that rather than evidence of a secret decision.
You did not betray anything. Nothing about a slow drain is a decision you made behind your own back, and no missing date has ever been counted against you. I am not saying it to comfort you. The written word says he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust (Psalm 103:14), which is God accounting for evaporation rather than being surprised by it, and the Holy Spirit, not the wording, is the one who makes that hold on a porch in the afternoon.
The man who asked where all the stories went
Here is what steadied me, and it is not a way of dating your own decline.
An angel greets a man threshing wheat in a winepress, hiding from raiders, and calls him a mighty man of valor. And the man's answer is not thank you.
And Gideon said unto him, Oh my Lord, if the LORD be with us, why then is all this befallen us? and where be all his miracles which our fathers told us of?Judges 6:13
Where be all His miracles which our fathers told us of. That is a man saying that the stories he was raised on do not match the field he is standing in, and it is said to a messenger from God, and there is no rebuke recorded anywhere in the exchange.
Read the next verse. The Lord looked upon him, and said, go in this thy might. No correction of the complaint. He is simply looked at, and then sent.
You have said what Gideon said, and the Word records a look rather than a lecture. That is written down as the next thing that happened, and it is the Holy Spirit who lands it in a woman who cannot find her day.
Nothing is being predicted, and no date is required
Something must be said on both counts.
Nobody here is asking you to identify the moment. A date is not required for any of this to be true, and the search for one is usually a search for somebody to blame, and the only candidate available is you.
And no forecast is being offered either. I do not know whether the thing you gave up on changes. This page will not say it is coming, because that has not been given to me, and an invented promise costs a person more than a quiet page ever did.
You have God's disposition toward you settled, and nothing about an outcome is being announced and no date is being demanded. Scripture says the Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering (2 Peter 3:9), which speaks about His character and never about a schedule, and it is the Holy Spirit, and He is the one who was present for every undated day of the drain.
And if this has cost more than anybody around this porch knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.
Here is the turn, then, and it is not a forecast and it is not a demand for a date.
God is not offended by what you have stopped expecting. He turns things that get written off, and your unbelief is not stronger than His kindness. The written word says if we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself (2 Timothy 2:13), which rests everything on His constancy rather than on the state of anybody's hope, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that true about your actual porch rather than about tired people in general.
I cannot tell you what God does about the thing, or when. Nobody honest can. What I can tell you is that a missing date is a fact about how slowly it went, and that a man in a winepress asked where all the miracles were and was looked at rather than lectured.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud on the step, in your own voice. The right to speak like this is yours in Christ, and it was never issued on the strength of how well you held on. The written word is the ground under it and the Holy Spirit is what keeps it living rather than merely honest, and what God does about the thing, and when, is His, in His own way and in His own time, and nothing on this page claims to know which.
- Slow drain I cannot put a date on, you are years of weather and you are not a betrayal I committed on a particular Tuesday. Psalm 103 says He knows my frame and remembers that I am dust, which accounts for evaporation instead of being surprised by it, and the Holy Spirit was present for every undated day of it. In the name of Jesus I stop hunting you for a culprit.
- Suspicion that a thing with no date happened without my permission, God has never said you over me, and you are not sitting on this porch tomorrow. Judges 6 has a man asking where all the miracles his fathers told him of had gone, and the next thing recorded is that the Lord looked upon him and sent him, with no correction anywhere, and His Spirit left it standing that way. I am saying the true sentence out loud today without a date on it.
- Father, if we believe not, yet You abide faithful, and Second Timothy 2 says You cannot deny Yourself. I thank You that Your Spirit never once required me to produce the day. Here is the thing I no longer expect, out loud, and I am not going looking for the Tuesday.
Judges 6:13
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