The Same Thing Every October

You could put it on a calendar. You have thought about doing exactly that, as a joke, and then decided it was not funny.

It comes in the fall. Late September, most years, into October. It has a shape you could describe to a stranger in about four sentences, and it has run about the same way for nine years.

The promise has held through all nine of them and nobody has ever mentioned that. And what has gone is not the ability to forgive it. You forgive it every year, in the sense that you do not raise it afterward and you do not hold it against him in the winter.

What has gone is the expectation of anything else. You now see it coming from about August, and you brace, and the bracing has become a bigger part of your year than the thing itself.

Before anything else, because on this row it always comes first.

If the repeated thing is somebody frightening you, controlling you or hurting you, then this is not a forgiveness question and I am not going to treat it as one. Forgiveness has never once meant staying where somebody is doing harm, and nobody who cares about you would ask you to take it again. Talk to somebody qualified where you live, this week, and if there is danger in that house, contact an emergency service or a domestic violence line today.

For everybody else, and for a man watching a calendar: this is about what runs out when a thing becomes predictable.

New every morning

There is a line in Lamentations, written in the middle of the worst chapter of a nation's history, and the timing in it is the thing.

They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness (Lamentations 3:23, King James Version)

New every morning. Not new when something improves. Not new when the pattern breaks.

The mercies in that verse are on a daily supply, and the supply is described in the middle of a book about a catastrophe that had not lifted and was not going to lift for a long while.

You are drawing on a supply that arrives on a schedule rather than on an improvement, and Lamentations has never once tied it to a situation changing. Lamentations 3:23 has them new every morning in the middle of an unresolved disaster, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a fact about a man's ninth October.

Now put that against what has run out in you. It is not the mercy. You have been supplied every morning for nine years and you have used it every year.

What ran out is the surprise. And the surprise was never the fuel.

You have not run out of what you needed, and the word has never once made an expectation of change the source of mercy. The passage puts the supply on a morning cycle with the catastrophe still running, and the Spirit of God is the one who tells a man what he actually has left.

Bracing is not the same as forgiving

Let me say something about the August part, because I think that is where the weight sits and nobody has named it.

Bracing is a real cost and it is not sin. A man who knows a thing is coming prepares for it. That is sense, not bitterness.

But bracing for two months a year, for nine years, is eighteen months of a man's life spent waiting for something that has not happened yet. And that time is not covered by forgiving what happens in October, because it happens before October.

So the forgiving has been aimed at the wrong month. You have been forgiving the event and carrying the anticipation, and the anticipation is the larger of the two.

You are able to bring the bracing into the forgiving, and no verse has ever once limited the mercy to the day of the offense. Lamentations 3:23 renews the supply every morning including the ones in August, and the Holy Spirit is the one who reaches a man in the waiting rather than only in the event.

You made a promise that has held through nine of these, and the covenant has never once required you to stop seeing it coming. It is written that they are new every morning, and the Spirit of God is the one who supplies a man for the month before as readily as for the month itself.

Say it out loud, and name the second half

Here is the assignment and it is two sentences and you should do it in August rather than in November.

Say out loud, alone: I forgive it. Name it plainly, in four words if that is all it takes.

You are spending a supply that arrives every morning whatever the morning holds, and Lamentations has never once tied it to a year improving. Lamentations 3:23 renews the mercies daily in the middle of an unresolved disaster, and the Holy Spirit is the one who meets a man in August as readily as in October.

Then say out loud what you will do differently. Not what he will do. What you will.

Something like: I forgive what happens in the fall, and this year I am not going to be the one who cancels the trip to make room for it.

That second sentence is what keeps a man from becoming furniture. Forgiving a thing has never obliged anybody to arrange their year around it.

You are able to forgive it and rearrange your own October in the same breath, and those two have never once been in tension. Lamentations 3:23 supplies the mercy daily without any reference to what the day contains, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a man says both sentences out loud at a gate.