Eleven Months Of Meaning To

You are going to go and see her. You have been going to go and see her since about the second week of last October.

That is not a lie you are telling yourself. You genuinely intend it. It comes into your head two or three times a week and every time it comes it is accompanied by a real warmth and a real intention and a small note of guilt that is getting less small.

Eleven months.

You know where she lives. It is not far. You have her number and you have used it twice, both times briefly, both times with a promise attached to the end of the call.

And every Sunday evening there is a moment, usually while you are doing something entirely mundane, when you realize you have not been again, and there is a small drop, and then it passes.

Here is what has changed lately, and it is why this is not simply a story about a visit.

The intending has started to hurt more than the not going.

There is a version of a person who never thinks about her at all, and that person sleeps fine. You are not that person. You think about her constantly and you do not go, and it turns out that this is a specific and quite corrosive way to live, and it has been eleven months of it, and it has begun to affect other things.

Hebrews puts it in an odd category

There is a short verse near the end of Hebrews that is doing something unexpected, and the unexpected part is where it files the doing of good.

But to do good and to communicate forget not: for with such sacrifices God is well pleased.Hebrews 13:16

Forget not.

That is a strange verb to attach to it. He does not say resolve, or commit, or be more compassionate. He says do not forget, which is what you say about something that is already known, already intended, already sitting in a person, and is simply not being acted on.

The writer is not addressing people with cold hearts. He is addressing people who already mean to.

And he calls it a sacrifice, which tells you he knows perfectly well that it costs something and that the cost is exactly why it keeps not happening.

So take this now, in month eleven. You are not a person who has forgotten how to love somebody. The written word aims that verse straight at people who fully intend it and do not move, and the Holy Spirit has been putting her in your head two or three times a week for eleven months, which is not an accident and is not guilt. It is a prompt.

The intention is not the problem and it is not the thing

Now let me be careful, because there is a cheap version of this that would tell you your intentions are worthless, and that is not true and it would be cruel.

Your intention is real. God sees it and it is not nothing.

But an intention has one job, which is to become an action, and an intention that has been held for eleven months without becoming one starts to do something else instead: it starts to function as a substitute for the action, and it produces a small regular ache which the soul, oddly, accepts as a kind of payment.

That is what has been happening on Sunday evenings. The drop and the pass. It is a tiny installment on a debt, paid weekly, and it settles nothing and it never ends.

And there is one more thing, and I say it gently. She is not waiting for the visit you have been intending. The visit in your head has grown for eleven months and now includes a proper afternoon and a real conversation and probably something baked. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it true in you.

She would take forty minutes and a cup of tea. She would take twenty.

You are not required to deliver the visit you have imagined. The written word says do not forget, and the Holy Spirit has been prompting, and what is being asked for is an ordinary Tuesday.

What the plain hall did with its people

There was a hall near the middle of Los Angeles in 1895 where a man named Phineas Bresee refused to let anybody rent a seat, and the work it became known for was rescue work in the streets right around it.

What strikes you reading about it is the absence of ceremony. People went. They went at odd hours and they went in ordinary clothes with nothing prepared, and a great deal of it was somebody simply being in a room with somebody else for a while.

Nobody was constructing an occasion. The near thing there was almost always a small visit, done badly, in the middle of a working day.

That is important for you specifically, because the reason you have not gone in eleven months is not that you do not care and it is not that you have no time. It is that the visit in your head requires a version of you that has a free afternoon and something to bring. The written word settled that, and His Spirit has been carrying it ever since.

That person is not coming, and she has been sitting in a chair for eleven months.

The written word says forget not, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps bringing her to mind.