The Third Week Of October

She keeps a note on her phone and she would be mortified if anybody read it.

It is not a journal. A journal would be a lovely thing and she has started four of them. This is a list of dates, and beside each date a single word, and the word is nearly always the same word.

Flat.

Flat, flat, flat, flat. Then in February a maybe. Then flat again for eleven days. There is a warm on the second of April which she does not entirely trust because she had been up all night with a sick child and thinks she may have been simply tender rather than met.

The list starts on the twenty first of October. She was on a retreat, in a house in the hills that somebody's aunt owned, with eleven other people and terrible coffee, and on the Thursday evening of that week God came near.

She has never described it and does not intend to. What she will say is that she went out afterward and stood in the yard in her socks, in the wet, for a long time, and did not feel the cold.

She came home. Life picked her up again in both hands the way it does.

And she started counting.

That is the thing. Not the counting itself, which is only a woman paying attention. The reason for it. She is building a case, one flat morning at a time, and the case is against herself, and she has been assembling it now for four years.

The dark does not read as dark to Him

There is a verse near the end of the hundred and thirty ninth psalm that I would like to put directly into your list.

The writer has been talking about hiding. He imagines the darkness covering him, which is what everybody imagines, because darkness is where a person goes when they suspect they are not worth being looked at.

Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.Psalm 139:12

Take that into your list this morning. You are as visible on a flat day as you were in a wet yard. The word says the night shineth as the day to Him, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been in every entry you marked down as nothing.

Both alike. Not the darkness is survivable, or the darkness will pass. Alike. The same. His seeing is not affected by the light level, which means your flat Tuesday is not a room He is unable to enter and your warm Thursday was not a room He liked better.

Hear this where you are, and know it is not a soft word I am inventing to make you feel better: you are seen right now, as you read this, at exactly the same resolution you were seen in the yard in your socks. His word says the night shines as the day to Him, and it is the Holy Spirit and not the temperature of your chest who makes that a present fact rather than a nice thought.

Your list is real. Your reading of it is wrong.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who went, reluctantly, to a small meeting on Aldersgate Street, and while somebody read aloud out of a preface, his heart, he wrote, was strangely warmed. That evening has been quoted for three hundred years.

Here is what almost nobody quotes. He wrote in his journal within a fortnight that he did not feel it any more. He wrote about heaviness. He kept writing that kind of entry, on and off, for decades, while riding a quarter of a million miles on horseback, preaching in fields because they had closed the buildings to him, standing in colliery yards at five in the morning, and spending years in prisons with people who could not repay him with anything at all.

The movement did not run on his Thursday feeling. It ran on a timetable he built the week after, and small groups meeting at a set hour, and plain questions asked out loud among people who knew each other, and a great deal of going where the poor already were.

The name that got attached to them started as a joke about how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was true.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and he held both while writing flat in his own journal.

You are not required to reproduce it. Let that settle, because it is the whole reason for the list. Nowhere is it written that dryness is a verdict, and nowhere is it written that a believer is to be assessed by their own weather. Scripture says nothing shall separate you from the love of God, and it is His Spirit who holds you there through eleven consecutive flat days.