I Know The Exact Date

Deborah could not tell you her own sister's birthday without thinking about it for a second.

She could tell you the twenty-second immediately. She could tell you it in her sleep. She could tell you what the twenty-second falls on this month, and next month, and she knows without checking that in December it lands on a Sunday and that Sundays are a problem.

She has never once written it down.

That is what she keeps coming back to, standing in her kitchen at half past six on the nineteenth. She writes everything down. She has a paper diary and two apps and a family calendar on the fridge with four different colors on it, and there is not one place in her entire organized life where the twenty-second appears, because writing it down would make it a thing.

And the shape of the month has quietly rearranged itself around a date she never agreed to memorize.

The week before is careful. The week after is easier. The four days on either side of it are why she said no to a trip in April, and why she has been vague about her friend's plan for a weekend in the spring, and why she looked at a job that would have involved two nights away and did not apply.

She is forty-six. She is good at her job and she is loved and she is, by any reasonable account, a functioning adult with a full life.

And a number between one and thirty-one is running the whole thing.

I did not choose this date. I have never even written it down. And it is the most reliable fact in my year.

And here is where I stop talking about Deborah, because you know your date, and you knew it before you finished reading that sentence, and you have never written it down either.

Let me say the first thing before anything else: the fact that the medicine may be entirely necessary does not make the calendar harmless. Both things are true at once, and holding both is the only honest place to start.

Your times are in a different hand

Let me put the strongest thing down first, because you are standing in a kitchen on the nineteenth and the nineteenth has a particular feeling.

Your life is not scheduled by that date. The dates in your year are not administered by a pharmacy, and that is not positive thinking, it is a claim about who is actually holding the calendar:

My times are in Your hand.Psalm 31:15

It is four words long and it is worth all four. The Hebrew word behind times is not clock time. It is seasons, occasions, appointed things, the whole shape of a life, and the psalm puts every one of them in a hand.

And notice what David is not saying. He is not saying his times are going well. That psalm is written by a man being hunted, complaining bitterly, in real trouble, and in the middle of it he makes a statement not about how things are going but about who has hold of them.

So the shape of your year sits in the hand of God, and Scripture is where I stand that rather than my own reassurance, and God's Spirit is not standing in your kitchen consulting a refill schedule before He tells you what is possible.

The date has been making your decisions

Now let me name what has actually been taken, because it is not what anybody looking at your life would guess.

Nobody has taken your health. You are functioning. Nobody has taken your job or your marriage or your reputation.

What has been taken is a series of decisions. April. The weekend in spring. The job with two nights away. Not one of those was refused because of a substance. Each of them was refused because of a date, quietly, with a reasonable sentence in front of it, and nobody in your life has any idea that a number chose it.

That is what this thing actually costs, and it is invisible, which is exactly why it has been allowed to keep going.

Hear this instead: the decisions of your life belong to you and they were given to you, and there is no part of your future God has subcontracted to a date. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it something you can act on rather than something you notice.

And now the practical half, and I will be exact, because getting this wrong is dangerous. Do not stop, reduce, ration or stretch anything you have been prescribed on your own. Do not skip doses to make a bottle last past the date, and do not go looking for another source to smooth the calendar out, and do not throw anything away in a moment of resolve. Some of these are genuinely dangerous to come off unsupervised. What changes this is a conversation with the person who prescribes it, and the sentence they need is not I think I have a problem. It is the refill date is the most reliable fact in my year and I have turned down three things because of it. That is clinical information and it is exactly the kind that changes a plan. And if you are ever in danger, if you have taken more than you meant to or the thought has turned toward not being here, get medical help now and tell one person today. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour. There are people awake right now.