The Year That Will Make A Great Story

Everybody keeps telling her this will be a great story one day.

Her aunt said it at Easter. A woman at work said it in a corridor. Somebody in a group she is part of said it while holding a cup of tea in a warm house, which is the detail she has not been able to stop thinking about.

The year in question is this one. It is happening now, at eleven at night, in a flat she can barely afford with a job that ends in November and a situation with her mother that nobody outside the family knows about.

She is not falling apart. That is worth saying because she is tired of being handled. She gets up, she works, she is funny about it, she has cried maybe four times all year.

But she has noticed the sentence and she has started to hate it.

One day you will laugh about this. You will look back on this year. This is going to make a great story.

Every one of those sentences is set in the future and told to her by somebody standing in a present she would very much like to be standing in.

And the worst part, which she would never say to any of them, is that they are probably right, and it does not help one bit at eleven at night, because she does not live in the retelling. She lives in it.

To this very hour, present tense

Here is the doctrine underneath your irritation, and it is real doctrine, not a mood.

Those sentences relocate you. They take the person actually sitting in the room and move her to a future vantage point where the whole thing is finished and safe and quotable, and then they describe her from there. It is a kindness, and it is meant well, and it is also a way of not sitting down.

Now hear this and hold it as something already true rather than something coming: you do not have to get to the end of this before it counts, and there is a passage that refuses to relocate anybody. That is not sympathy talking, it is what stands written in the fourth chapter of First Corinthians, and the same Holy Spirit who carried that line is in that flat at eleven at night.

Read it and watch the tense.

To this very hour we go hungry and thirsty, we are in rags, we are brutally treated, we are homeless. We work hard with our own hands.1 Corinthians 4:11-12

To this very hour.

Not: there was a difficult period and God brought us through. Not: one day we will laugh about this. Present tense, while it is happening, written down by a man who is in it as he writes.

He does not tidy it and he does not promise himself a retelling. He puts the hunger and the rags and the working with his hands into the record in the only tense that was honest at the time.

So this belongs to you tonight rather than in the version you tell later: your year counts as it is happening, in the tense it is happening in, because the written word keeps the present tense and never once asks the sufferer to narrate from the far side, and the Spirit of God is with you in the room you are actually in.

And let me guard it properly, because this is the exact place the teaching goes bad.

Nothing here makes a hard year holy. Poverty is not a virtue, exhaustion is not a qualification, and I am not going to admire your November because that would just be another way of not sitting down. Nothing here says you should stay in it either, or that seeking a way out is a failure of faith.

What is written simply keeps the hour in the record without decorating it, and the Holy Spirit has never asked anybody to be finished before He would come near.