I Gave It Three Weeks

She never told anybody about the deadline, which is how she knows it was a real one and not a joke she was making to herself.

Three weeks. She had decided it on the Sunday night, lying in bed with her hair still damp on the pillow, in the specific way you decide things at eleven at night when you are twenty-three and full of a thing you have no vocabulary for.

Not consciously as a test. She would have been horrified at the word. She simply thought: give it a bit. Give it three weeks and see what is different.

Week one was fine, honestly. Week one was a sort of glow. She was reading more and she was kinder to her flatmate and she noticed a tree.

Week two she had a bad Tuesday, and a worse Wednesday, and on the Thursday she was short with somebody at work in the way she has always been short with people at work, and she went home on the bus and thought, hm.

Week three she was busy. Genuinely busy, a deadline at work, a thing with her sister. And on the Sunday, the actual Sunday, the twenty-first day, she did not even remember. She remembered on the Tuesday after, in the shower, and the remembering came with a small internal shrug that she has thought about for eleven years.

Because that shrug was the moment. Not the water three weeks before. The shrug.

She did not stop believing anything. She went to church the following Sunday and she has been going ever since. She has led a small group for six years and she is genuinely good at it, better than she thinks, and there are four women who would say her name if you asked them who has helped them most.

But she stopped waiting.

And that is a difficult thing to explain to anybody, because it does not look like anything. There is no lapse to point at. She simply became, quietly, over the course of one Tuesday shower, a woman who had lowered her expectations of God without ever putting it into a sentence.

She is thirty-four. And every so often she hears somebody in her own small group say the sort of thing she used to say at twenty-three, and she feels something she has never been able to name and does not entirely like.

The deadline was not the problem

I want to start with the shrug, because I think it deserves better than the eleven years of quiet embarrassment it has had.

That shrug was not cynicism. It was a young woman doing what a mind does when a hypothesis is not confirmed: she filed it, gently, and got on with her life. And because she was gentle about it, and because she did not stop believing anything, nobody ever noticed, including her, for a long time.

So let us not spend energy on whether it was wrong to set a deadline. It was not wrong. It was the perfectly reasonable act of someone with no vocabulary for what had happened to her, and God was not offended by the twenty-one days.

What I want to look at is what you were watching for, and where it actually was.

For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.Colossians 3:3

Sit on the word hid. Not lost. Not delayed. Hidden, deliberately, and the location is given: with Christ, in God.

That is the answer to a woman who spent three weeks looking for something and did not find it. You were looking in the visible register for a life that Scripture says was placed out of sight on purpose, and that is not a consolation, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is going into the shrug rather than into your theology of the hidden life, which is probably already quite good.

And notice why it is hidden there. Not to be withheld. A thing hidden with Christ in God is hidden the way an inheritance is held in trust: securely, by somebody competent, in a place nothing can get at it.

Now let me say something about week two, because I think week two did more damage than week three.

You had a bad Tuesday and you were short with somebody at work, and you took that as data. It felt like the fair-minded thing to do. You had said you would look at the evidence, and here was some.

But you were reading the wrong instrument again. You are dead, and your life is hidden with Christ in God, and that sentence was as true on the Wednesday of week two as it was during the glow of week one, and Scripture says so flatly, and the Spirit of God has been the guarantee of it through eleven years of you not expecting much.

I want to touch the thing you feel in your small group, too, because I think you have been slightly ashamed of it.

When one of those women says the sort of thing you used to say at twenty-three, something moves in you that you do not like. It is not contempt. I think it is closer to grief. You recognize her, and you know what happens on the Tuesday in the shower, and you cannot warn her, and you would not want to.

Hear this over that. You have not lost what she has. It did not evaporate on day twenty-one. The word says it was hidden, and the Spirit inside you is the deposit on it, and eleven years of not expecting much has not moved it one inch from where God put it.

And here is the last, and it is the one for a woman in a shower on a Tuesday.

You are not a woman whose faith went quiet. You are a woman who was told to look for something in a place it was never kept, looked honestly, did not find it there, and drew a modest conclusion. The conclusion was wrong and it was not dishonest, and the God who hid your life in Himself did not spend eleven years disappointed in you for it. Colossians 3:3 says your life is hidden with Christ in God, which is an address rather than an absence, and the Holy Spirit has been the deposit on it every one of the eleven years.