I Cannot Promise To Be Anywhere

She stopped saying yes about four years ago and nobody noticed, because she stopped by degrees.

First she started saying probably. Then I will let you know nearer the time, which is a sentence that sounds considerate and is in fact a small withdrawal. Then, for about the last two years, she has mostly not been asked, which is what happens, and which is not anybody's unkindness. People stop asking somebody who cancels. It is not a moral failure in them.

She is thirty-seven.

The thing itself is hers and it is not going in here, and it is one of the ones where you look entirely well on a Thursday and cannot get out of a chair on a Friday, and where the Friday is not predictable from the Thursday by her or by anybody.

What she can tell you is the arithmetic. Out of any four things she agrees to, she gets to roughly two and a half. And it is never the same two and a half, and she has kept a note for eleven months trying to find a pattern and there is not one.

So she has become a woman who does not agree to things, and she has arranged that around herself so competently that most people in her life experience her as private rather than ill.

And here is the piece that is actually the subject.

She has wanted this particular thing for a long time. And every version of it she has ever seen or been told about has a date in it. Somebody arranges a day, and people come, and it happens on that day, and the whole shape of it assumes a person who can promise to be somewhere.

She cannot make that promise. She has tried to work out a way to ask for it that does not involve making it, and she has not found one in three years, and so it has stayed where it is.

He never asked for the guarantee

I want to say the plain thing first, and I want to say it before any comfort, because comfort that arrives before accuracy is useless to somebody who has heard a lot of it.

You have been asked for a guarantee by every human arrangement you have encountered, and you cannot give one, and you are right that you cannot.

That is not defeatism. It is accurate, and being accurate about your own body after four years is a form of integrity, and I am not going to suggest you try harder to be reliable, which is the thing people say and which asks a woman to promise something her body has not agreed to.

So no page here asks you for a date.

Now let me put underneath you what God has actually been doing, and notice the verb, because it is unusual.

Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.Psalm 139:3

My path and my lying down. Both of them, named separately, in one sentence.

The path is the day you get up and go and do things. The lying down is the other one. And David does not put them in a hierarchy. He does not say God accompanies him on the path and waits for him on the days he is flat. Both are compassed, which is a word about being surrounded on all sides.

And then: acquainted with all my ways. Acquainted is a relational word. It is what you are with a person, not what you are with a schedule.

You are compassed on the path and in the lying down, and God is acquainted with both, and that is not encouragement for a woman with a chair she could not get out of, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the eleven months of notes rather than on a psalm you already love.

Now let me say something about the withdrawal by degrees, because I think nobody has ever named it back to you.

Probably. Then I will let you know nearer the time. Then not being asked.

That was not cowardice and it was not a failure to advocate for yourself. It was a woman protecting other people from the disruption of her own unreliability, at considerable cost to herself, over four years, quietly.

You have been carrying the whole cost of it alone so that nobody else had to carry any, and Scripture says God is acquainted with all your ways, which includes the four years of gradual withdrawal that nobody else noticed, and the Spirit of God has been with you on every one of the Fridays.

Now the practical part, and it is one sentence, and then I stop.

Ask one person, and ask them whether it could be arranged without a date.

Not whether they could accommodate you. Not whether there is a way to make you more reliable. Whether the thing itself could be done in a way that does not begin with a promise to be somewhere, and could instead begin with a phone call on a morning when you already know.

I am not going to tell you who to ask or what the answer will be, because I do not know your city or your body or the people in it. But I will say that in three years you have been asking yourself a question that only somebody else can answer.

You are not excluded by an unreliable body. The word puts the lying down in the same sentence as the path and gives them equal weight, and the Spirit is the seal on it, and God has never once required a guarantee from you that He did not intend to keep Himself.

You are compassed on the path and in the lying down, and God named both of them in one line. Scripture uses a relational word for it rather than a scheduling one, and the Holy Spirit has been with you on every day your body took away without warning.