This Part Of My Life Is Simply How It Is

She would not call it despair, and she would be right, and that is what has made it so hard to notice.

There is one area of her life that has not moved in nine years, and at some point it stopped being a situation and became a description. She does not pray about it. She does not think about it as unresolved. If you asked her about it she would tell you plainly and without much feeling that this is simply how her life is, and she would sound entirely healthy saying it.

She reads it as acceptance. Most people around her read it as maturity. It has the surface of both.

But underneath there is a small hard thing that she has only recently caught sight of, and it is not acceptance at all. It is a boundary she has drawn, and God is on the other side of it, and she drew it without ever consciously deciding to.

Nine years. And it has become so much a part of the furniture that raising it now would feel almost theatrical.

If you have filed a whole area of your life as permanent, come and sit down. Nothing about your conclusion is going to be argued with here.

Acceptance and a drawn line look identical from outside

Let us separate two things that wear the same clothes.

Real acceptance holds a thing loosely and stays open, and it is genuinely one of the healthiest states a person can be in. A drawn line looks exactly the same from the outside and is doing something different underneath: it has closed a question and filed the answer, and closed questions do not get revisited.

The difference is not detectable by anybody watching, and it is barely detectable by the person themselves, which is why nine years can pass.

And this is worth saying: noticing the line is not the same as being told to erase it. Nothing here is asking for that.

You are not being scolded for a line you did not know you had drawn. Nothing about that conclusion has ever bound God, and nothing you have filed has set a limit on Him. I am not saying it to unsettle you. The written word says the LORD is good to all: and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), where all is the widest word available and no area of a life is exempted from it, and the Holy Spirit presses that home in a kitchen with the door open.

The question He asked in the desert

Here is what steadied me, and it is not a demand that you start expecting something.

There is a moment where Moses does the arithmetic out loud. A whole nation wants meat in a wilderness, and he goes through the numbers with God, and the numbers are correct and the conclusion is impossible. And God answers with a question rather than a promise.

And the LORD said unto Moses, Is the LORD'S hand waxed short?Numbers 11:23

Waxed short. Shrunk. Grown too small for the job. It is a strange phrase and it is exactly right for what a drawn line does: it does not deny God, it quietly resizes Him to fit the situation.

Notice also that God does not scold Moses for the arithmetic. The arithmetic was right. The question He asks is about something the arithmetic could not measure.

You have been asked a question rather than handed a rebuke, and the Word leaves the question standing open. That is written down as a question and not as an argument, and it is the Holy Spirit who puts that in the hands of a woman who filed something nine years ago.

Nothing is being predicted for that part of your life

Something has to be said very plainly, because this is where the promise usually appears.

I do not know whether that part of your life changes. Nobody does. This page will not tell you that it is about to, or that nine years is long enough, or that God is moving on it now, because I have not been given that and an invented promise would be a cruelty dressed as encouragement.

You have God's disposition toward you settled, and nothing about your circumstances is being announced from here. Scripture says the Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering (2 Peter 3:9), which describes His character and never a schedule, and the Holy Spirit is the one that has carried nine years of a closed question exactly as He carried the years it was open.

And if this has cost more than anybody around you 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.