I Have Not Felt It Since Spring

Bríd knows the exact week it stopped, which is not usual and is part of what unsettles her.

It was the last week of April. There was a morning where she came back in and stood in the hall with her coat still on and thought, that was good. Not dramatic. A very ordinary good. The kind of morning that makes you glad you got up.

And she has not had one since, and it is now well into the autumn.

The work itself has not changed. It is exactly the same work, with the same people, at the same time on the same days, and objectively nothing whatsoever went wrong in May.

What went is the wanting.

Before April she used to look forward to it in the way you look forward to a swim. There was a lift in her when she thought about it in the car. She would think of things for it while doing something else entirely, and the thinking was a pleasure and not a duty.

Now she thinks about it and there is nothing at all. Not dread. Nothing. A flat gray absence where the lift used to be, and the practical result is that she has gone twice since June, and both of those were because somebody else was expecting her.

And here is the thing that has begun to frighten her, and she has not said it to anybody.

She has always assumed the wanting was the evidence.

Evidence that this was hers, that she was in the right place, that God was in it. And on that logic, the absence of the wanting reads as the withdrawal of all three, and she has been quietly interpreting a flat autumn as a verdict on the whole of the last six years.

She is not lazy and never has been. She is weather dependent, and she has only just found out, because until April there was always weather.

And you may know this exactly. The thing you do when you feel it, and the fact that you have not felt it in months, and the quiet dread that the not feeling means something about you or about God that you would rather not look at.

The flat stretch is not the absence of the work, it is where a particular thing is made

Take this off before anything else, because you have carried it since June and it was never yours.

You are not out of God's will because the lift has gone. You never were. Scripture is entirely unsentimental about pressure and dryness and treats them as productive rather than as evidence of anything, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your appetite for it, who keeps a person at a work. Set that down in the hall with your coat on. It is heavy and it has kept you home twice a week since the summer.

Now hear the sequence, and notice that it runs the wrong way round from how we feel it.

We also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.Romans 5:3

Read the order. The hope is at the end.

Which means that in the middle of the sequence there is a stretch where you have perseverance and you do not yet have the hope, and Scripture treats that stretch as normal rather than as failure, and His Spirit is at work in the whole of it. It is the working part of the process. It is where character is being made, and character is precisely the thing that cannot be made in a good April.

And the word for the stage you are standing in is not lost. It is perseverance, which is the name Scripture gives to going when you do not want to.

You have that available. Right now, in a flat autumn, with no lift in you at all. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who supplies perseverance to people who have run out of appetite, and He has never once been restricted to the weeks that feel good.

Now here is the part I want to place gently, because it is where it turns over.

There were people who stayed with one long wrong for forty years, and their letters survive, and the striking thing about them is how flat most of them are. Not despairing. Flat. Notes about attendance and postage and who was ill. Long stretches with no fire in them at all.

The fire is in about four documents out of hundreds.

What kept the thing alive was not those four documents. It was the hundreds, and the hundreds were written by tired people on ordinary mornings who did not feel a thing and wrote them anyway.

Scripture puts perseverance in the middle of the sequence and puts hope at the end of it, and His Spirit is the one who carries a person through the middle, and none of that requires the lift to come back first.

And I will say the honest half, kindly. You have been treating the wanting as evidence for six years, and it was never evidence. It was a gift for a season, and gifts for a season are real and are not owed to anybody, and when they go they do not take the calling with them.