The radiator makes a noise at ten past six every morning, and you have stopped hearing it the way you stopped hearing the trains.
One year. That is what you said when you signed. One year, maybe eighteen months, and then something with a second bedroom and a door that does not open straight onto the kitchen.
That was seven winters ago.
The room has been good to you in its way. You know which floorboard to avoid. You know the exact angle to open the window so the latch does not stick. You have a shelf, and on the shelf there is a small tin, and in the tin there is what there is, and you do not need to open it to know, because you counted it in October and again in January and the number did not do what you needed it to do either time.
Nobody asks any more. That is the part that got quiet without you noticing. In the second year people asked how the saving was going, and you had an answer that sounded like progress. By the fifth year they had stopped asking, and you understood that this was a kindness, and you also understood what it meant.
Seven winters is not a season. Seven winters is a life you did not choose, arriving one Tuesday at a time.
The man who wrote this had lost more than a room
There is a sentence people put on cards, and it comes out of the worst book in the Bible.
It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. The LORD is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him.Lamentations 3:22-24
Read what surrounds it before you let it be comfortable. Jeremiah is sitting in the ruins of a city. He has just said God has broken his bones, hedged him about, made him drunk with wormwood, and set him as a mark for the arrow. Twenty verses of the blackest honesty in Scripture, and then this.
He does not talk himself out of the grief. He does not explain the ruin. He does not find the lesson in it and hold it up. He simply reaches past the whole wreck and takes hold of one thing that is still true, which is that mercy came again this morning, as it does, whether or not anything else moved.
That is the shape of what I want to hand you. You are not required to explain these seven years to yourself before you are allowed to be steady in them. I am not offering you my own opinion on your life. The word says His compassions are new every morning, Lamentations 3:23, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a thing you feel and not a thing you merely read on a card.
What we are not going to do with the years
We are not going to explain the drought.
I do not know why the tin has not filled. Nobody who tells you quickly is telling you truly. The people who arrive with a reason for another person's long lack are usually easing their own discomfort at the sight of it, and they leave with the discomfort gone and leave you with a sentence you now have to carry as well.
So no. Not a lesson. Not a season with a purpose you must accept. Not a discipline. Not a test you are somewhere in the middle of passing or failing. Scripture does not authorize me to hand you any of those, and the Holy Spirit does not need you to have understood a thing before He is willing to be near it. You are not in a classroom. You are in a rented room, in the seventh winter, and God is in it with you.
That is a smaller claim than an explanation and it is worth more, because it is one I can actually make.
The tin and the man are two different things
Here is where a long lack does its real damage, and it is not in the tin.
It is in the slow, unannounced merger of the number and the man. Seven years of a figure that will not move, and one morning the figure stops being a fact about your circumstances and becomes a fact about you. You are the man who could not. You are the one still there. Everyone else has a hallway.
Pull those two apart, because they were never one thing. Scripture never files a man under his shortfall, Psalm 34:18, and the Holy Spirit has never once introduced you to God by your arithmetic.
You are His portion-holder before you are anything a tin can measure. That is not a phrase I invented to make you feel better; Jeremiah says the LORD is my portion, Lamentations 3:24, in a city with nothing left in it at all, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a man able to say that in a room where the arithmetic disagrees.
A portion is what is set aside for you at the table. It is not what you managed to gather. Jeremiah has lost the city and he has not lost the portion, and he says so out loud while sitting in the rubble of the first thing.
Steadiness is not the same as pretending
I am not asking you to say the room is fine. It is not fine. You wanted a hallway and a second bedroom and a latch that works, and wanting that is not greed and it is not unbelief.
Steadiness means something narrower and much sturdier. It means the seventh winter does not get to decide what you believe about God's character, and it does not get to decide what you believe about yourself.
You have not been forgotten in here. The word says the Lord is good to them that wait for Him, to the soul that seeketh Him, Lamentations 3:25, and the Holy Spirit has been in this room at ten past six every morning for seven years, whether the radiator was the only thing you heard or not.
The tin is a fact. It is not a judgement. There is no verse anywhere that reads a slow year as a sentence passed on a person, and there is no line in Scripture where a delay is presented as evidence against the one waiting.
You have been treating this room as a verdict awaiting appeal. It is not a verdict. It is a room.
The thing you can put down this morning is not the wanting. Keep the wanting. Put down the private sentence you have been reading out of the tin, the one that says a man who is still here after seven winters must be a man something is wrong with. Scripture never wrote that sentence, Lamentations 3:31-32, and the Holy Spirit has not been agreeing with it in here at ten past six.
You are held in the seventh winter exactly as you were held in the first. The word says His mercies are why we are not consumed, Lamentations 3:22, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a room where nothing else has changed since October.
He is not waiting for the tin to fill before He is willing to be your portion. He is your portion in a room with a sticking latch, this morning, at ten past six.
Declare this over yourself
Speak these as a man standing in Christ, under the will of God, with no date placed on Him. Scripture gives the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words. He may answer in a way you did not plan for, and the outcome is His, and He may answer in His own way.
- Seventh winter in this rented room, you are not my name and you never were. Scripture says His compassions are new every morning, and this morning is one of them, arriving into a room you thought you had the last word in.
- Sentence I have been reading out of that tin, that a man still here after seven years must be a man something is wrong with, get out of this room in the name of Jesus. Scripture says the Lord is good to the soul that seeks Him, Lamentations 3:25, and the Holy Spirit has been near me at ten past six on every one of these mornings.
- Lord, You are my portion, and a portion is set aside and not gathered. I am writing the years down in plain figures and putting my hand on them, and I am done letting a tin tell me what You think of me.
Lamentations 3:22-24
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