She Cannot Tell Which Years Were Real

The timeline is the thing that has undone her.

Not the fact of it. The fact of it was terrible and she absorbed it in about a fortnight, the way people do, and she has cried the amount a person cries and she has been to the meetings and she has done what could be done for the people who were most affected, which was mostly listening.

It is the dates.

Because when the dates came out, it turned out that it had been going on the whole time. Not a late season. Not a collapse at the end. The whole time, including the years she thinks of as the best years of her life.

And her mind has been doing something ever since that she cannot switch off.

It sorts.

She will be driving, or standing at a sink, and it starts: that weekend in the second year, was that real. The thing that happened at the retreat when she was thirty-four, is that still true. The night she sat on the floor of that hall until half past one and something in her changed permanently, does that count.

Two years of that. Thousands of hours, cumulatively, and the pile has never come out the same twice.

Some days almost everything survives the sort. Some days almost nothing does, and those are the days she does not answer the phone.

And what she is actually trying to do, she realized in the spring, is establish which parts of her own life she is allowed to keep.

That is the project. It has no method and no end point and no criteria, and she has been running it, alone, most days, for two years.

And you have a timeline. Something came out and it turned out to overlap with a stretch of your life you loved, and you have been quietly sorting ever since, and the pile keeps changing.

The same yesterday and today and forever

There is one sentence in Hebrews that puts a floor under a life that is being sorted, and it does it by naming what did not vary.

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.Hebrews 13:8

The same yesterday.

Which includes the second year, and the retreat when you were thirty-four, and the night on the floor of that hall until half past one. He was not different in any of those years. Nothing that anybody else was doing altered Him by a fraction in any of them.

And that is the thing your sorting has been unable to account for, because your sorting is examining the room and the people, and He is not in that category at all.

You are looking for the reality of those years in the wrong place, and the constant in every one of them has never been under review. It is written that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever (Hebrews 13:8), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a floor under a woman standing at a sink rather than a line to be admired.

Now the sorting itself, and it needs to be named for what it is.

It has no criteria. You said so yourself, and you would have to say so if anybody asked, because there is genuinely no test you could describe that would decide whether the night on the floor of that hall was real.

That is not because you have not thought hard enough. It is because the question is not answerable from where you are standing, and a mind given an unanswerable question does not stop, it loops, and it will loop for another two years and then two more.

You are running a process that cannot terminate, and stopping it is not a failure to reach a conclusion. Scripture says be still, and know that I am God (Psalm 46:10), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes stillness possible in a mind that has been sorting, which is a mercy and not an instruction to try harder.

And the night on the floor, because that is the load bearing one and you know it is.

Something in you changed permanently. That is your own description, given at the time and never revised. Whatever else was going on in that building in that year, at half past one in the morning there was a woman on a floor and something happened in her that has held for years since.

Ask what would have to be true for that to be false. Not merely for the room to be compromised, which it was, but for the change in you to be false. Somebody would have had to produce it, deliberately, in a woman who was alone on a floor at half past one when nobody was in the room.

You were alone with God at half past one in the morning and there is no version of that night in which anybody else did anything to you. It is written that in Him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28), and it is the Holy Spirit who was the one present in an empty hall, which is His ordinary business and always has been.

And the days when almost nothing survives the sort.

Those days do not tell you the truth. They tell you what your mind does when it is exhausted, and you have noticed that the pile correlates with how tired you are rather than with any new information, which is the clearest possible sign that the sorting is not producing knowledge.

You have been treating your worst days as your most accurate ones, and that is exactly backwards. Scripture says the Lord knows our frame, He remembers that we are dust (Psalm 103:14), and it is the Holy Spirit who does not take a woman's evidence on a bad Thursday as her final testimony about her own life.