Twenty Years Without a Surprise

It arrived while she was doing something entirely ordinary, which is where these things always arrive.

Cynthia was putting cups back on the hooks in that hall on a Sunday, the way she has done for two decades, and the music was still going in the other room, and she was singing along to something without particularly noticing that she was.

And a sentence went through her, whole and unwelcome.

I have not been surprised by any of this in twenty years.

She stood there with a cup in each hand.

She is not in trouble. She wants that clear. She loves that hall and those people and she has not missed a Sunday except for illness and one funeral, and she means every word she sings.

It is simply that she knows all of it now.

She knows what the songs will say. She knows the shape of the year: the same season, the same passages, the same run of Sundays. She knows what she will feel at the carol service and roughly when, and she is not being cynical, she genuinely will feel it and it will be lovely.

She could set a clock by her own soul, and she has begun to find that unbearable in a small quiet way she has told nobody about.

Twenty years, and she cannot point to one morning where she was taken by surprise.

She has been given things. Comfort, plenty of it, and steadiness, and she would not swap the twenty years for anything. But comfort is not surprise, and steadiness is not surprise, and somewhere in her there is a woman of fifty-nine who would like, once more before she dies, to be caught off guard by God.

She hung the last cup and turned the light off and did not say a word to anybody.

And you may know that hall. You may know your own year off by heart, and you may not have been surprised in a very long time either.

The word attached to His mercies is not familiar, it is new

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

You are not stale. You never were. Scripture attaches one particular word to His mercies and it is the opposite of the one you have been feeling, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the state of your appetite, who makes anything new in a person. Set it down here in the hall. It is heavy and it has been in your hands since you hung the last cup.

Now hear the line, and hear where it is written from.

Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22

That is from the middle of the saddest book in the Bible, written by a man in a ruined city looking at things nobody should have to look at.

And in the middle of that, he says new every morning.

Not reliable every morning, though they are. Not the same every morning, which is what steadiness sounds like. New.

Which means the freshness is a property of His mercies rather than a property of your appetite for them, and a woman can be entirely familiar with the songs and be receiving something this morning that has never existed before.

That is happening in you right now, at fifty-nine, with a cup in each hand. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who brings it, and He has never once run out and reissued yesterday's.

Now let me be careful, because there is a ditch here.

Nothing here says the twenty years were flat or that comfort is a lesser gift. It is not. A great many people would give anything for what you have had, and steadiness through two decades is a work of God and Scripture honors it and His Spirit did it.

And nothing here promises you a surprise. I cannot promise that and I will not try. Nobody arranges those, nobody earns them, and their absence is not a verdict on your appetite or your faithfulness or your hall.

The point is only what the word in that verse actually is, and that it is not a description of how anything feels.

Here is the tender part, and His Spirit is gentle with it. You are not asking for entertainment.

You have been quietly ashamed of that sentence since Sunday, in case it means you have gone shallow. It does not. What you are asking for is the thing that verse is talking about, and it was asked for first by a man in a ruined city who was not looking for a lift.

Scripture calls them new every morning and His Spirit is the one who carries them in, and neither of them has ever asked a woman to manufacture wonder about a thing she has known for twenty years.