The Week It Comes Every Year

The furnace comes on for the first time that year at about ten to five in the afternoon, and the whole house fills with the smell of burning dust.

She likes that smell, normally. The coils cook off a summer of it. It means sweaters coming down out of the closet, and the good blanket, and the soup pot off the top shelf where it lives from April to October.

She is at the sink with a colander of green beans. The light through the window has gone that low amber it goes at this time of year, laying a long bar of it across the counter and up the side of the cupboard.

And something sits down on her.

That is the only way she has ever found to say it. Not a thought. Not a worry with a subject she could go and argue with. A weight, arriving whole, the way a coat is laid over your shoulders from behind by somebody standing where you cannot see them.

She puts the colander down. She dries her hands on the towel hanging off the oven handle, one finger at a time, slowly, and then she looks at the calendar on the side of the fridge.

The ninth.

Four years ago on the eleventh her mother went into the hospital in the middle of the night, and for six days nobody could say anything to her that was worth anything at all.

Her mother came home. Her mother is seventy-eight and complains on the phone twice a week about a neighbor's leaf blower.

That is the part she has stopped trying to explain to anyone. The bad thing ended. The bad thing ended well. And every year the second week of October comes up the drive and lets itself in through the back door like it still has a key.

It lasts about nine days. It goes as suddenly as it came, usually on an ordinary Tuesday, and sometime in the third week she notices that she has been humming.

But right now it is the ninth. The furnace is running. She is standing in her own kitchen with wet hands and a bar of amber light across the counter, and she does not want to make the soup.

That is you, and it is probably not October.

Maybe it is the two weeks before the anniversary of the day the phone rang. Maybe it is every February, or the run-up to a birthday, or the week the clocks change. Maybe you can put your finger on it to the day. Or maybe it arrives with nothing attached to it at all, and you have gone looking for a reason for years and never once found one, and being asked for a reason is its own small humiliation. You do not owe anybody a cause tonight.

Hear this first, before anything else. What comes up your drive in that week is not a failure of faith. It is not backsliding, it is not ingratitude for a bad thing that ended well, and it is not evidence about you. Nobody in heaven is standing over your kitchen with a clipboard in the second week of October.

What a shadow can and cannot do

A shadow is the one thing in a room with nothing in it.

It has a shape, and the shape is exact. It can cover a whole floor. It can make a hallway look like a different hallway. And it is not made of anything, because it is not a thing at all: it is what happens on the wall when something stood in front of the light. The shape belongs to a body that has already passed by.

That is what the second week is. It is a shape. It is the silhouette of six days you lived through four years ago, thrown forward onto a kitchen you are standing in now, and the body that cast it went past you a long time ago. Psalm 30 is where that is written down, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line about the morning and stands it in a kitchen in the second week of a bad month.

Here is what David wrote out of a season he had already come through.

For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.Psalm 30:5

Look at what he does with the night. He does not shorten it and he does not apologize for it. Weeping gets a whole night. The word underneath "endure" there is the word for lodging, the word you would use for a traveler who takes a room, puts his bag down, and stays until it gets light.

A lodger acts like he lives there. He uses the kitchen. He knows which stair creaks. And he does not hold the deed, he has never held the deed, and there is a checkout time built into the arrangement that he did not set and cannot move.

So hear what that hands you tonight. You are standing in a house that has a morning attached to it. That is not a hopeful way of looking at things, it is Psalm 30:5, written down and kept for three thousand years, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a line like that across all of them and lays it on a kitchen counter in the second week of October.

The week has no hands. It cannot lift one thing off your shelf. It arrives with the authority of a smell and the confidence of a landlord and it has neither, because Scripture never once ties His mercy to a date on a calendar. It says His mercies are new every morning, Lamentations 3:23, and it is His Spirit, not the sound of any sentence I write, who makes that a fact in the room you are actually standing in.

There is nothing here for you to perform. You are not being handed a method that works if you do it right and collapses if you do it wrong, because that is not how any of this has ever operated. The word does the carrying and the same Spirit does the moving, and your part is only to stop bracing long enough to receive what has been true since before you were born.