She has a name for it in her head and she has never once said the name out loud.
The year God was away. That is what she calls it, silently, when it comes up, which it does more often than she admits. Not a dramatic year. Nothing that would look serious written down. A long gray stretch from about September to the following March in which she got up and worked and answered messages and functioned, and the whole of it happened behind glass.
She prayed through it. Not well, but she did not stop.
And somewhere in the November of it she stopped expecting any of the praying to reach anything, and by January she had assigned the season its name, and the name has stuck for six years.
She would tell you, if you asked directly, that she does not really believe God goes away. She would be embarrassed at the theology of it. But the name is still there, filed and permanent, and a name that has sat in a person that long is not a theological position, it is a floor she stands on.
If you have a name like that for a season, come and sit down. Nothing you went through is going to be explained to you here, and nothing is going to be renamed for you either.
What actually goes away in a gray season
Let us look carefully at what left, because something genuinely did and it matters that it gets named accurately.
Color went. Interest went. The sense that things mattered went, and the capacity to be moved by anything went with it, and prayer stopped feeling like anything at all. Every one of those is a real loss and none of them should be waved away by a page like this one.
But look at the list again. It is a list of what a person can perceive, and not a list of who was in the room. The two got confused during a hard autumn, which is where they always get confused.
You were not left in that autumn. Nothing that went gray was God going anywhere, and nothing about those six months put you outside His reach. I am not saying it for comfort. The written word says he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee (Hebrews 13:5), stated as a settled arrangement rather than as something responsive to the weather, and the Holy Spirit, not the wording, is the one who makes that hold across a September to a March.
The promise given to a man who asked for exactly this
Here is what steadied me, and it is not an instruction to feel differently about your season.
There is a moment where a man asks God, quite bluntly, not to send him on without Himself, and the answer he gets is shorter than the request.
And he said, My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest.Exodus 33:14
Read what is actually promised. Presence, and rest. Not an explanation of the desert. Not a shorter journey. Not a change of weather.
The whole exchange is remarkable for how little it offers besides the one thing, and how completely that one thing satisfies the man who asked. He does not follow up. He does not ask for terms.
You have that same promise standing over a gray season, and the Word never made it contingent on the season being bright. That is written down as an answer and left exactly there, and it is the Holy Spirit who puts that in the hands of a woman who has had a name for six years.
Nothing is being renamed for you
Something must be said plainly, because a section like the last one usually ends with somebody being asked to call their season something nicer.
Nobody is asking you to rename that autumn. You may go on calling it whatever you have called it, and this page has no requirement about your vocabulary. What is being said is one thing about who was in it, and that claim can sit alongside your name for it without either one having to move.
You have one claim here and it is the entire content of it: He was there. Nothing else about the six months is being asserted. Scripture says whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence (Psalm 139:7), asked as a question with no answer, and it is the Holy Spirit, and He is the one who was in the flat through every gray week of it.
And if that autumn still costs more than anybody 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.
Now the turn, and it is not an explanation, and it is not a request.
God was in that place and you did not know it. He was near you in the grayest week of it, and nothing that happened there put you outside His reach. The written word says the darkness and the light are both alike to thee (Psalm 139:12), which is a sentence about His sight rather than about your visibility, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that true about your actual autumn rather than about difficult years in general.
I cannot tell you why the color went, or when it comes back if it has not. Nobody honest can. What I can tell you is that a list of what a person could perceive was never a list of who was in the room.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, in your own voice. The right to speak like this is yours in Christ, and it was never issued on the strength of how bright a season felt. The written word is the ground under it and the Holy Spirit is what keeps it living rather than merely calm, and what God does about the years since, and when, is His, in His own way and in His own time, and nothing on this page claims to know which.
- Long gray autumn, you are a stretch of weather and months and you are not the year God was away. Exodus 33 answers a man who asked not to be sent on alone with My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest, and the Holy Spirit never made that contingent on the season being bright. In the name of Jesus I take the name off you.
- Confusion between what I could perceive and who was in the room, you are not God's word about me and you are not sitting in this kitchen tomorrow. Hebrews 13 says He has said, I will never leave thee nor forsake thee, put as a settled arrangement and not as a response to the weather, and His Spirit was in that flat through every gray week. I am saying the months out loud today at ordinary volume.
- Father, the darkness and the light are both alike to You, and Psalm 139 says that about Your sight and not about my visibility. I thank You that Your Spirit was three feet away through the whole of that winter, the way a walled garden waits behind a stiff door. Here is the season by its months, out loud, and here is one sentence to You about it.
Exodus 33:14
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