I Stopped Counting In March

She closed the notebook in March and she has not opened it since, and she has kept going anyway, and nobody knows either of those things.

A kitchen table on an ordinary evening. The good chair, which is only the good chair because it does not rock. A radio on low that she is not listening to. Somebody's homework on the far end that will have to be moved before anything can be eaten.

The notebook is in the drawer with the batteries and the takeaway menus and the small screwdriver.

It is a plain notebook and the front of it is shopping lists and a phone number for a man who fixed the boiler. It is the back that mattered. She started at the back, upside down, the way you do when you want something separate, and she kept a tally.

Not of days. Of the thing. Every time it happened, or did not happen, or nearly happened. Four years of small marks in fives, and dates in the margin, and once or twice a word.

She kept it because in the first year she needed evidence that she was not imagining any of it.

And in March she counted the page and sat there for a while and then closed it and put it in the drawer, and she has never told a living soul why, and the reason is this: the counting had stopped being evidence and had turned into a scoreboard, and she was losing.

She still does everything she did before March. Every single thing. She just does not write it down.

That is you, and your notebook might be an actual one, or a date you used to mark, or a way of measuring that you quietly stopped because measuring was making it worse.

Two plain things before anything else. If somebody in your life is frightening you or hurting you, nothing here is telling you to keep going and take it; tell one person today who can act. And whatever this is, it is not a person. 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. It has been tried on you and it produced a new kind of tiredness. I am also not going to tell you that this is nearly over, because I do not know that and neither does anybody who says it to you.

The verse names a season and refuses to date it

There is a sentence that gets used badly, and read carefully it is doing almost the opposite of what it usually gets made to do.

And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.Galatians 6:9

Take the middle first. In due season.

Notice that he does not date it. He could have. He is writing a letter with a great deal of specific instruction in it, and here, at the one point where a tired reader would most want a number, he names a season and gives no timing whatsoever.

That is not vagueness. That is the deliberate withholding of the one thing that would let anybody, then or since, tell a struggling person that it is nearly over. Nobody can date it because Paul did not, and any voice that has given you a timeline was not getting it from here.

You are inside something with no date on it and nobody has ever been able to put one there. That is not a lift for a woman with a drawer full of batteries: Galatians 6:9 names a season and withholds every specific, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an undated thing bearable in a body that stopped counting in March rather than the patience anybody can manufacture at a kitchen table.

Weary in well doing is not the same as being tired

Now the first half, because it is the half that gets used as a rebuke and it is not one.

Let us not be weary in well doing. That has been read at tired people for a very long time as though it meant do not get tired, which would be both cruel and impossible, and would make Paul the only writer in Scripture who ever told somebody that exhaustion was a failing.

It is not about the state of a person's energy. It is about giving up on the doing. And the tell is in the sentence itself: he says it to people who are, obviously, tired. You do not tell rested people not to grow weary.

So the question that verse actually asks is not how are you feeling about it. It is are you still doing it.

And she is. Every single thing she did before March, she still does. The counting stopped. The doing did not.

You have not fainted, and closing a notebook was never the same as stopping. The written word puts the not fainting in terms of continuing rather than in terms of energy, and the Spirit of God has been the one keeping a woman at it since March, never the record anybody was able to keep.

And about that last clause, if we faint not, which has been used as a threat over people who were already on the floor: it is a condition and it is honest, and it is not a warning aimed at you. You are still here. You are still doing it. Whatever that clause is about, it is not about a woman who kept going for five months after the scoreboard stopped.

You are standing, and standing was always the assignment. Scripture attaches one instruction to the whole armor and that instruction is stand, and His Spirit is what has had a woman doing every one of those things with nothing written down.