Which Year Do I Give Them

She has two years she could give and she only ever gives one of them.

The one she gives is the summer she was nine. There was a river and a preacher who had come through and a great many people, and she was one of them, and her mother kept the date written inside the front of a book which is still in the house.

That is the answer she has given for sixty-five years, and every word of it is true.

The other year is the one after her husband died.

She was fifty-two. He went in eleven days from something nobody had seen coming, and what happened in her over the following fourteen months is the thing she cannot describe at a table and has never tried.

She would not say she was not a believer before it. She was. She had taught children for thirty years by then and she meant every bit of it.

But something happened in that year that had not happened before, and she knows it, and if you sat her down and made her be honest she would tell you that if there is one year that made her what she is, it is that one and not the river.

And that is the trouble.

Because saying so feels like taking something away from a nine year old girl and her mother's handwriting inside the front of a book. So she has never said it out loud to anybody, and she is seventy-four, and she still gives them the river.

He began it and He is carrying it

Let me be plain, the way you would want it.

You have been treating those two years as rivals, and they are not, and the reason you cannot resolve it is that you have been asked to answer a question nobody actually asked you.

Nobody wants your single date. They want a sentence at a table. You are the one who has decided that only one of those years is allowed to be the answer, and you have spent twenty-two years managing an argument that has only ever had one participant.

Now hear this and take it as already settled rather than as comfort: the timeline of what God has done in you is not yours to arbitrate, and there is a line in that letter that puts both ends of it in His hands. That is not an old woman's kindness talking, it is what stands written in the first chapter of Philippians, and the same Holy Spirit who was over that river is the one who sat with you through fourteen months.

Read it, and notice that there are three tenses in one sentence and every one of them belongs to Him.

Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.Philippians 1:6

He who began. Not you, and not the preacher, and not your mother's pen.

Will carry it on. Which means the thing is a continuous work and not a series of separate events with one of them ranked first.

You have been trying to identify the moment the work started, from inside the work, using a memory that was nine years old at one end and grieving at the other. That was never going to come out.

So take this now rather than after you settle it: you are not required to choose, because the written word puts the beginning and the carrying and the finishing in His hands in a single sentence, and the Spirit of God has been at work in you across sixty-five years of which two were louder than the rest.

And I will guard it, because grief can be misused here and I have seen it done.

Nothing here says the loss of your husband was a tool. It was not. God did not take a man in eleven days to deepen his wife, and anybody who tells you otherwise has told you something cruel and untrue, and you may put it straight down.

What is written simply refuses to break the work into rival dates, and the Holy Spirit was already in you in the years you now describe as thin.