That Was Not You Getting Your Act Together

She brought the casserole dish back washed, which nobody does anymore, and now she is sitting at your kitchen table with the baby on her hip and she is asking you how you did it.

You know why she is asking. She is in the middle of the same thing you were in the middle of, and she has heard enough of it around town to know you came out the other side, and she wants the map. So you pour her a cup and you push the sugar over and you tell it.

You have told it plenty of times. It has a shape by now. It starts bad, it gets worse, and then there is a turn, and you always mark the turn with the same sentence, and you say it to her across the oilcloth exactly the way you have said it in every hallway for four years.

That was the March I finally got my act together.

And then something odd happens. The sentence hangs there over the sugar bowl and it sounds wrong. Not untrue exactly. Wrong the way a note is wrong. You have said it a hundred times and never once heard it, and this afternoon, with a stranger's baby chewing on a spoon and the light coming in low across the table, you hear it.

Because you were there. You know what that March was actually like. You know what you were and were not capable of on the fourth of that month, and it was not a turn. There was nothing in you to turn with. You had already quit, in the quiet way people quit without announcing it, and if the whole thing had been left to what you had, you would still be sitting in it.

Something happened that month. Something happened to you.

And you have spent four years handing people a sentence with the wrong person in the middle of it, and now a young woman is sitting in your kitchen writing it down, and you can feel that the map you are giving her is missing the only road that goes anywhere.

The Month You Keep Describing Had Somebody In It

Let me start with the sentence, because you already heard the trouble in it and that is the Spirit's doing, not mine.

You were not the one doing the verbs that March, and this is not me being modest on your behalf or trimming your story to sound humble. Ezekiel 34:12 puts a shepherd out walking on a day of clouds and thick darkness, doing his own seeking, and the Holy Spirit is the one who made your usual sentence ring wrong over a sugar bowl this afternoon.

Read it, and mark who is doing what.

As a shepherd seeks out his flock when he is among his sheep that have been scattered, so will I seek out my sheep, and I will rescue them from all places where they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness.Ezekiel 34:12

Count the verbs and then find the subject of each one. Seeks out. Will seek out. Will rescue. Every single one of them belongs to the shepherd. The sheep in that sentence performs exactly one action in the whole verse, and the action is being scattered, which is not an action at all. It is a thing that happened to it.

So look at the grammar of your March, because the grammar is the whole rescue. You were the object of that sentence and not the subject of it, and His word says it in that order on purpose, and the Spirit of God has been trying to hand your own turnaround back to you correctly since the week it happened.

Now, you did not build the tidy version to steal anything. You built it because somebody asked a short question in a hallway and a short question needs a story with a beginning and a middle and an end, one that fits between the coffee urn and the door. Nobody has ten minutes for clouds and thick darkness. So the story got shortened, and shortening always cuts out the same part, which is the hand.

And here is what the short version costs, and it is the reason this page exists. If March was your doing, then the next time down you will have to do it again, and you will have to find a March you have not got. You are not held by a month you managed. Colossians 1:13 says the delivering was done by God and the moving into the kingdom was done by God, and the same Spirit who did the carrying then is the one steadying the chair you are in now.

One plain thing before we go on. If going back down has ever come with thoughts of ending your life, or of quietly not being around, then say that out loud tonight to one living human being. A sister, a doctor, a pastor, an emergency line. In the United States, 988 answers a call or a text around the clock. Anywhere else, emergency services or a local crisis line will take it. That is not a failure of faith, and the person who makes that call is nobody's burden. God puts real rescue into human hands on purpose, and reaching for one of those hands is obedience, not defeat.

Go back and look at the week before that March, at the parts that never made it into the hallway version. The phone that rang at twenty to seven on a morning you had already decided about. The truck that would not start on the one morning it mattered. The woman from two roads over who would not quit calling and had no business being that stubborn. You were being sought through every one of those, and Psalm 23 hands the seeking and the leading and the restoring to the Shepherd rather than to the sheep, and the Holy Spirit was inside those ordinary means the entire time.

Do not swap one wrong word for another, either. It was not luck. Luck is what people say when they will not say a name, and it leaves a person exactly as alone in the next bad winter as the strength version did. Both words do the same job. Both keep a hand out of the story.

Something got hold of you that March and it was not you. You were reached, and reached is a passive word on purpose. It is written in Ezekiel 34:12 that He rescues out of all the places where the scattering happened, and the Holy Spirit is the one putting the true sentence back in your mouth at that table.