Eleven Months of the Same Total

The shutter comes down at eight and the counting takes eleven minutes. Ibrahim has done it so many times that his hands do it while he thinks about other things.

Notes flat, coins in the tray, the tray into the drawer. Then the ledger, which is the hard-backed kind with a cloth spine, because his uncle used one and it seemed like the right thing to buy when he took the shop. One line a day. Date, total, a word or two if something odd happened.

At the end of a month he adds the column and writes the month's figure out in the margin and draws a circle round it. His uncle did that too.

There are eleven circles now.

That is the thing he cannot stop looking at. Not that the numbers are low, although they are. It is that they are the same. Eleven months, and the spread between the best of them and the worst of them is small enough to be a fortnight of rain. Nothing is collapsing. Nothing is moving. It is as if somebody has set a ceiling in his shop at a certain height and gone away.

He has done everything a man does. He changed the hours. He put the cold drinks by the door. He talked to the wholesaler twice and got a better price on one line and a worse price on another. He knows this street. He is not lazy and he is not stupid, and both of those facts have started to feel like part of the problem, because if he were either one there would at least be something to fix.

And he prays. That is the part I want you to see.

Every morning, before he unlocks, standing in the dark shop with the smell of the cardboard, he says a promise out loud. He has a few. He says one of them properly, the way you say something you mean, and then he pulls the shutter up and the day begins.

And every night, eleven minutes after the shutter comes down, the ledger answers him.

He noticed it three weeks ago and it has been sitting in him since. The order. He speaks in the morning, and the number speaks at night, and the number always gets the last word, and it is in his own handwriting, which somehow makes it worse. It is not a stranger contradicting him. It is him, in his own hand, ending the argument every night at ten past eight.

Last Tuesday he sat on the stool with the pen still in his fingers and said out loud, to nobody, the thing he had not said before:

I believe the word. I just have not heard it since March.

The complaint made it into the Bible

Before Habakkuk says the sentence everybody quotes, he says a sentence almost nobody quotes, and God let both of them into the book.

O LORD, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear? He says it in the first four verses. He says he is crying out about violence and God is not saving. He says the law is slacked and judgment never goes forth. It is not a polite prayer. It is a man with a ledger of eleven months, laying the column out in front of God and saying, this is what I am actually looking at.

And God does not rebuke him for it. God answers him.

Hold that before anything else, because a man in month eleven usually assumes his own honesty is the problem. It is not. Scripture kept the complaint on the page next to the answer, deliberately, and you are welcome in that book exactly as you are tonight, with the column adding up to the same figure again, and the Holy Spirit is not embarrassed by a word of it.

The vision has an appointed time and it is not your appointment

Then comes the answer, and God tells him to write it down where a runner can read it, and says this:

For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry.Habakkuk 2:3

Notice what is guaranteed in that sentence, because it is easy to hear it as a forecast about a business and it is not one.

What is guaranteed is the vision. God's word, God's appointed time, God's speaking. And the promise made about it is that it will not lie. That is the load in the verse: at the end it shall speak, and not lie.

It does not say the ledger is wrong about the ledger. Ibrahim's column is accurate. Eleven months really did total what they totaled and no one is asking him to pretend otherwise. What the verse denies is the ledger's authority to say what God has spoken. Those are different jobs, and only one of them has an appointed time attached.

You are holding a word tonight that has never lied and has no obligation to agree with a till, and you were holding it in March too, on the days it felt like holding nothing. That is what the written text says of itself, and His Spirit is the one keeping it a live word in a dark shop rather than a slogan on a wall.

I am not going to tell you what the eleven months are for

Now let me say the thing this site will not do, and let me say it plainly, because it has probably been done to you already.

I do not know what the eleven months are for. I am not going to tell you God is building something in you through them, or teaching you a lesson, or pruning you, or preparing you for something bigger. I do not know that, and neither does anybody who has said it to you across a counter, and Habakkuk was not told either. God answered him with an appointed time and He never once explained the delay.

What I will not do is take the locked door off the table. It is still locked. You will go back to that shop tomorrow and the shutter will still go up on the same street, and this article does not change one figure in your margin.

What changes is which voice is left in the room afterward.

You have a word from God in your hands that has not been amended by eleven circles, and it was not amended by the eleventh any more than by the first, and Scripture is where that word stands and His Spirit is the one holding it steady in your chest while your own handwriting argues with it.

Habakkuk names the empty things first, and then he says yet

And here is the practical gift at the end of that little book, and it is the reason this category asks you to speak in a particular order.

Habakkuk finishes by listing everything that is not there. Though the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labor of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls.

He goes item by item. He does not spiritualize one of them. He names the empty stall.

And then: yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation.

Look at the order. The contradiction first, out loud, in full. The word second. Not because naming the trouble is brave, but because whatever is spoken last is what is left standing in the room, and Habakkuk knew it, and Ibrahim discovered it accidentally at ten past eight on a Tuesday and had the order backwards.

You are being handed the order tonight, and you were given the right to speak it long before this evening. Scripture says the vision does not lie, and His Spirit is what turns a sequence of sentences into something a man can stand on when the shutter comes down.