Eleven Winters Of Feeding

The heel of her boot goes through the top of the ice and the water comes up black, and this is the eleventh winter, and she has never once told anybody what she thinks while she does it.

Not light yet. That flat gray that is not dark and is not morning, where the yard is visible but has no color in it, and everything sounds closer than it is. Her breath going up. The animals already moving toward her out of the dark, because they know the sound of a boot on ice and they have known it longer than most marriages last.

She breaks it in the same place. Left of center, where it is thinner. She has known that about this trough since she was thirty two.

Then the feed, which takes eleven minutes, which she knows because for one winter she timed it, out of some impulse she cannot now reconstruct.

Eleven winters.

And the thing she thinks, while her hands do it, is not despair. It is quieter and flatter than that and it has been the same for about three years: none of this counted for anything.

Not the animals. They are fine. She means the whole shape of it. Eleven winters of getting up in the dark and the place is not bigger, the debts are the debts, her brother still calls on Sundays and does not come, and she is eleven years older and the water still needs breaking at the same spot.

She straightens up. Her back does what it does now. First light is not up and will be in about forty minutes and she will not see it, because she will be inside doing the other thing by then.

That is you, and your trough might be a ward, a route, a house, a person you have got up for since before you can properly remember.

Two plain things before anything else. If somebody in your life is frightening you or hurting you, nothing here is telling you to keep getting up and taking it; tell one person today who can act. And whatever this is, it is not a person. Not your brother who calls on Sundays. Scripture is direct that the struggle is not against flesh and blood, and that is a mercy rather than a technicality, because it means you can stop losing to somebody you also love.

And I am not going to rally you. That has been tried on you and it made you tired in a new way. I am also not going to tell you it is nearly over, because I do not know that and neither does anybody who says it to you at a gate.

The most famous line in the book comes out of the worst chapter

There is a sentence that goes on cards and mugs, and almost nobody knows where it is standing.

They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:23

Lamentations is five chapters of a man looking at a burned city. It is not a book about encouragement. Chapter three, which is where this line lives, contains some of the bleakest things any believer has ever written down and kept, including a man saying plainly that his strength and his hope are gone.

And then, in the middle of it, without any change of scenery, without one thing improving, this.

They are new every morning.

Notice what is new. Not the situation. The city is still burned in verse twenty four exactly as it was in verse eighteen. What is new is the mercy, arriving daily, at a place where nothing else has changed at all.

Which is precisely the shape of an eleventh winter. She is not looking for the situation to be new. She has stopped expecting that, and stopping was not a failure of faith, it was eleven years of information. What she has not known is that something has been arriving anyway, every one of those mornings, into a yard where nothing was different.

You have had something new every morning of the eleven winters, and it was never the situation. That is not a lift for a woman with a bucket: Lamentations 3:23 places the newness in the mercy and puts it in a chapter where nothing has improved, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a daily thing daily in a body that has been getting up in the dark for a decade rather than the hope anybody can find at a frozen trough.

Counted is not the same as visible

Here is the thing that needs pulling apart, because the sentence she thinks is doing something specific.

None of this counted for anything. That is a sentence about a ledger. And the ledger she is using has exactly one column in it, which is: what is different now compared to eleven years ago.

By that column the entry is honest and the entry is nil.

But nobody has ever shown her the other columns, and there are several, and one of them is simply this: eleven winters of animals that did not go without water. That is not nothing. It has never once been nothing. It is the least dramatic thing imaginable and it is also the entire content of most faithfulness anybody has ever shown, anywhere, and the reason it does not appear on her ledger is that a thing which does not fail is invisible by design.

You have been counting in the one column where the entry is nil, and eleven winters have been going into the others. The written word puts the newness in the mercy rather than in the circumstances, and the Spirit of God has been the one arriving in a gray yard every morning, never the results anybody can point at after a decade.

And nobody is asking you for one more push. The instruction attached to the whole armor is stand, four times in six verses and no fifth verb, and breaking ice at a trough in the eleventh winter is that verb wearing work boots.

You are standing, and standing was always the assignment. Scripture calls a person who is still on their feet at the end of it standing, and His Spirit is what has had a woman out at that gate for eleven years.