Your Body Remembers The Date First

The list says four things and she has read it three times.

She is in the supermarket at ten past five on a Wednesday, holding a basket with milk in it and nothing else, standing in front of a wall of bread, and she cannot make the decision. Not a hard decision. Bread.

Seven days now. That is how long it has been going on. She wakes at 4:40 without an alarm, on the dot, and lies there with her heart going like she has run for a bus. She snapped at her son over a cereal bowl on Monday and heard her own voice come out of her like it belonged to somebody else. Her jaw aches every morning. She has driven past her own exit twice this week. On Sunday she dropped a mug and cried about the mug for eleven minutes.

And nothing is wrong. That is the part she keeps circling. Work is fine. The boy is fine. The bills are fine. There is no bad news anywhere in her life, and she has gone through it item by item at four in the morning the way you check a house for an open window, and every window is shut.

So she has decided she is getting sick. Her thyroid, maybe. Too much coffee. She made a doctor's appointment on Tuesday and she is glad she did.

Then at the register the girl says, without looking up, "sorry, is it the ninth today or the tenth? I lose track."

And she says, "the ninth."

She does not cry in the store. She gets to the car. She puts the bag on the passenger seat and sits with both hands on the wheel in a supermarket parking lot at twenty past five, and out loud, to nobody at all, she says, "oh."

Because it is seven days to the sixteenth. And her body started on the second, two weeks out, the way it has started on the second every year for a long time, and it did not tell her, and it did not ask her permission, and it has been running exactly on time.

That is you, in the car, with the milk going warm on the seat.

Maybe yours is a month and not a day. Maybe it is the first cold morning of the year, or the smell of a school hallway in September, or a song that comes on in a store. Maybe you know your date exactly and have never once said it out loud to another person. Maybe you have gone strange for two weeks every year for a decade and only found out this week that it was a date doing it.

Two things before anything else, and I want both of them on the table before we go a step further.

The first is that I am not going to ask you what happened. Not once, anywhere on this page. You do not have to name it, type it, remember it in order, or explain it to me or to anybody else in order to receive a single thing here. That is not me being delicate with you. It is that what happened to you was never the price of admission to peace, and anyone who makes it one is charging you for something God gives away.

The second is that this is not a failure of faith. A body that keeps time is not a soul that failed to trust. You did not do this and you are not doing it now. Nobody in heaven is standing over that parking lot with their arms folded, and I am not either.

Somebody has been keeping the count too

Everything I have for you sits in one line, and it is one of the strangest and kindest lines in the whole book.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?Psalm 56:8

Tellest means counts. Tallies. Keeps the number.

And what is being counted is not sins and not prayers. It is wanderings: the tossing and turning, the back and forth, the restless movement of a person who cannot settle. That is 4:40 in the morning with your heart going. Somebody wrote that down as a thing worth counting three thousand years before anybody had a word for it.

Then the tears. Put them in a bottle. Not wiped away, not waited out, not filed under overreaction. Collected, corked, kept, the way you keep something you intend to hold on to.

And then a question with only one possible answer: are they not in thy book?

So hear what is already true of you, and hear it before anything else in this message. You are not malfunctioning. Your body has been keeping a record it never showed you, and so has God, and His is not a countdown, it is a keeping. Psalm 56:8 puts the tossings in a tally and the tears in a bottle, and it is not this page saying that over you. It is the Holy Spirit carrying a line older than your calendar into a parking lot at twenty past five.

Look at what the verse does not do. It does not tell the man to stop crying. It does not ask him to explain. It does not require him to name the thing or forgive anybody first before the bottle comes out. God takes the body seriously exactly as it is presenting, which is more than most people manage and more than you have managed with yourself.

Because here is what has probably been happening in you every October. Not only the dread. Underneath it, a running commentary that says a real believer would be over this, that seven days of this is self indulgent, that other people have had worse and are fine. That voice has been the second half of your annual weather for years, and it is a liar.

You have been counted. Every one of those 4:40 mornings is already written down in a book you have never read, and none of them are entered as failures. That is what the word says and it is not a metaphor somebody made up to be nice to you. His Spirit is the one who takes an old sentence like that and makes it land in a chest that has been braced since the second of the month.

And a word about your care, plainly and warmly. Keep that doctor's appointment. If there is somebody trained to sit with people around this kind of thing, a counselor, a therapist, a good doctor, going to them is wisdom and not a lack of trust, and I would say the same to my own family. If there is medication, keep taking it exactly as prescribed, and never change a dose over anything anybody writes anywhere, including me. All of that is provision, and God is entirely inside it.

Let me name the loneliest part, because it is not the date. It is the not knowing why. It is seven days of thinking it must be an illness, or a character flaw, or the start of losing it. It is apologizing to people for a mood nobody can account for, and being, on top of everything else, a mystery to yourself.