The Year I Have Never Named

There is a year he has never described to a single person.

Not to his wife, not to the man he prays with on Thursdays, not to the counselor he saw for a while in his thirties and liked. Nobody has the whole of it, and several people have small pieces they have never been able to fit anywhere.

He does not think about it as a secret. He thinks about it as a thing there is no useful way to say. When it comes up sideways in conversation he moves past it the way a man steps over a hole he knows is there.

But he has a conviction about that year that he holds without ever inspecting it, and it is this: God was not in any of it. Not one day. He would not say God abandoned him, because that sounds like an accusation and he does not want to make one. He would say, if pressed, that God simply was not present in those twelve months, and that they are his to carry alone because nobody else was there.

If there is a year in your life like that, come and sit down at the end of this table. Nothing about what happened is going to be asked for here.

Unspoken is not the same as unwitnessed

Let us separate two things that have been fused together for a long time.

Not having told anybody is one fact. Nobody having been there is a completely different one, and the first has quietly been used as evidence for the second for years. If nobody knows about it, it starts to feel as though nobody was in it.

That is an ordinary human confusion and it is not a spiritual failing. Silence and solitude sit so close together in a person that the mind stops distinguishing them.

You were not alone in that year. Nothing about the fact that nobody knows changed who was in the room, and nothing that happened there put you outside His reach. I am not saying it to be gentle. The written word says he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee (Hebrews 13:5), stated as an arrangement rather than as something conditional on being seen by anybody, and it is the Holy Spirit, and He is the one who makes that hold across twelve months nobody has ever heard about.

The dark that could not hide anything

Here is what steadied me, and it is not an invitation to describe your year to me or to anybody.

The psalmist reaches, near the end of his search, for the last place he can think of. Not distance. Dark.

If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me.Psalm 139:11

He tries to use the dark as a covering. It is the instinct of every person who has ever had a year they could not say out loud: if it is dark enough, nobody can see it, and that is a relief and a horror at the same time.

And the answer that comes back is not a rebuke. It is that the night is light around Him. The dark does not work as a hiding place, and the reason that lands as comfort rather than as exposure is what the next verse says: the darkness and the light are both alike to Him.

You were seen right through that year and never once exposed by it. That is written down as the end of a search for a place to hide, and the Holy Spirit is the one that makes it land in a man who has stepped around a hole for years.

Nothing is being asked of you

Something has to be said very plainly, because a section like the last one usually arrives with a request attached.

Nobody is asking you to tell it. Not to me, not to this page, not to anyone. There is no requirement here that a person say the contents out loud in order for any of this to be true, and any page that made that a condition would be doing exactly what this site exists to stop.

You have one claim in this article and it is the whole of it: He was there. Nothing further is being asked and nothing further is being said about your twelve months. Scripture says whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence (Psalm 139:7), a question asked in a psalm about being fully known, and the Holy Spirit is the one who was in every unnamed day of it.

And if that year 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.