A Diary I Do Not Recognize

You bought a paper one because you always used to buy a paper one, and it arrived on Tuesday, and you opened it at the front the way you always did.

Empty squares. Twelve months of them.

Four years since it started. You are not going to describe the four years here and you do not need to, because you have described them enough times to enough people in enough rooms and you are tired of the shape of your own account.

It has lifted. That is the actual, extraordinary, ordinary fact of this autumn. Not entirely, and not in a way that lets you make plans in the way people who have never lost their plans make plans, but it has lifted, and the days are largely yours again.

And you sat with a new diary open at the front for about twenty minutes and could not write a single thing in it.

Not because there is nothing. There are things you could do. There are people who would be delighted and a job you could probably go back to in some form and a church that has kept asking.

It is that you do not know who the person is that the diary is for.

The woman who used to fill one of these had a whole apparatus of assumptions about what a week was and what she could promise and how much of herself there was to go round. You have not been her for four years and you are not entirely sure she exists any more, and the empty squares are waiting for somebody.

The verb belongs to God

There is a line in the twenty-third psalm that people read past because it is three words long.

He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.Psalm 23:3

He restoreth. The whole psalm is like this. He makes me lie down. He leadeth. He restoreth. He prepareth.

There is almost nothing in that psalm for the sheep to do. The sheep is led, fed, laid down, walked through a valley, and set at a table, and the activity is almost entirely on the other side.

That matters at a table with an empty diary, because the question you have been asking yourself for twenty minutes is what you are going to do about who you are now, and the psalm does not put that on you.

You are being restored by somebody, and it is not you. I am not putting my own idea over you here. Scripture says He restoreth my soul, Psalm 23:3, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing it in a woman who has just realized she cannot fill in a Tuesday in March.

Nobody gets to say the four years were worth it

Somebody will say it. Probably several people this autumn, and they will mean it warmly. It has made you who you are. Or the other one: it was all worth it in the end.

And something in you will go still, and you will nod, and you will not be able to say why it landed wrong. Scripture never asks a person to grade their own suffering, Psalm 77:2, and the Holy Spirit has not been waiting for you to.

Here is why. That judgement is yours. It belongs to the woman who lost four years, and to nobody else on this earth, and when a person makes it on your behalf they have taken the only thing those years left in your hands.

So I am not going to say it. I do not know whether it was worth it and neither does anybody who is delighted for you.

You are the only one with standing to weigh those four years, and you may take as long as you like. Scripture lets a psalmist say my soul refused to be comforted without correction, Psalm 77:2, and the Holy Spirit has never demanded a summary as the price of comfort.

The empty squares are not a test

And here is what has been happening at that table.

You have turned the diary into an examination. If you can fill it, you are back. If you cannot, something is still wrong, and the four years took something permanent.

That is not what an empty diary is. It is paper. Scripture set no such exam, Psalm 23:2, and the Holy Spirit is not marking it.

And more than that: a life is not a schedule, and being restored is not the same as being busy. There is no verse anywhere in which a person's recovery is evidenced by how full their week is, and there is no version of the twenty-third psalm where the sheep proves anything.

You are not required to demonstrate that you are back. Scripture says He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, Psalm 23:2, and the Holy Spirit is not standing behind a woman at a kitchen table waiting for her to write something in March.

Who the diary is for

One more thing, and it is the gentlest one.

You said you do not know who the person is that the diary is for.

You do not have to know. She is being restored, present tense, by God, and she does not have to be identified in advance and written into a paper book before she is allowed to exist.

Write one thing in it. Not a commitment. Something small and good in about three weeks' time, and see what it feels like to have written it.

You are whole now, on this side of it, without having worked out who you are yet. Scripture says He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake, Psalm 23:3, and the Holy Spirit does the leading, which means the route does not have to be legible to the one being led.