The Habits Were Never the Covenant

He had a system and the system was excellent.

Twenty minutes with the chapter and the notebook before the house woke up, five years and change without a real gap. Tuesday nights he unlocked the hall, put out the chairs, made the urn, and locked up after. Thursdays the men's group, where he was not the leader but was the one who noticed when somebody had stopped coming. Sunday, obviously. He was not showy about any of it. He would have said, if pressed, that these were simply the shape his faith had, the way a river has banks.

Then came the month.

His contract ended on the second, which he had known was coming and had not really believed. On the ninth his wife's mother had the fall, and the fall turned into a hospital, and the hospital turned into a rota of long drives that swallowed every evening. He got the flu somewhere in there, the real kind, the kind that puts a grown man on the settee for six days. And a lease ran out on a house they were not ready to leave and they moved, badly, in the last week, with everything in the wrong boxes.

By the first of the next month there was nothing left of the system. Not one piece. The notebook was in a box, and he could not have told you which box. He had not been at the hall in five weeks and somebody else had the key now. The men's group had sent two kind messages, both of which he had read on a hospital corridor and neither of which he had answered.

Here is the part that actually frightened him, and it was not the guilt.

He took the bins out on a Tuesday evening, at the new house, in the dark, and standing there with his hand on the lid he did the arithmetic and worked out that he had not thought about God in about nine days. Not resisted. Not wrestled. Not once thought about Him.

And he stood there waiting to feel terrible about it. And he did not feel terrible about it. He felt nothing much at all, and it was that, the nothing, that went through him like cold water, because a man who feels nothing has no way of telling whether there is anything there.

He went back inside and sat on a box in the hall and could not locate the thing he had been living inside for eleven years. He knew where the habits had been. He could not find the covenant, and it dawned on him, sitting on a box with the tape still on it, that he had never actually known where it was kept. He had assumed it was in the twenty minutes.

Perhaps you have had a month like that, or a year. And perhaps the question underneath it is not have I sinned. It is a stranger and colder one: was there ever anything under the routine, or was the routine the whole of it?

Who is doing the verbs in Hosea

Hosea is not a subtle book. It is addressed to a people whose record at that point was a public scandal, and the prophet is not permitted to soften it. So when the tenderest sentence in the whole book arrives, it arrives in a place where nobody has earned it and everybody knows it.

And I will betroth you to me for ever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness, and you shall know the LORD.Hosea 2:19-20

Read it once more and watch who is doing things. He betroths. He betroths. He betroths. Three times, and every single time the subject of the verb is God, and the other party is standing there with nothing in her hands at all.

Then look at what the betrothal is made of. Righteousness, justice, steadfast love, mercy, faithfulness. Not one of those five is a quality being demanded of her. They are the things He brings into it, the terms He is binding Himself in. And the last clause, you shall know the LORD, is not the price of the arrangement. It is what comes out of the far end of it.

This is a betrothal, not a service contract. That distinction is the whole article. A contract is held up by performance on both sides and lapses when one side stops performing. A betrothal is held up by an oath, and an oath is held up by the character of the one who swore it.

So take this personally tonight, on a box in a hallway if that is where you are: you are inside something God swore in His own righteousness and mercy, and it is not under review. Hosea 2:19-20 has Him doing every one of the verbs, and the Holy Spirit is the one making that sentence land somewhere in you that a bad month cannot reach.

What the month actually took

Let me be exact about the loss, because vagueness helps nobody here.

The month took your practices. That is a real loss and I am not going to talk you out of grieving it. Practices are how love gets a body. A marriage with no daily anything in it goes thin, not because the vows lapse but because two people stop being in the same room, and the same is true here. Go back to them. I will say that warmly, and once, and then leave it, because it is not the thing you came in needing.

What the month did not take is the betrothal, and it could not have, because the betrothal was never located in the twenty minutes. You put it there. Everybody does. The habits are so reliably present that you stop noticing they are a response and start experiencing them as the thing itself, and then a month like this one comes and the shelf is bare and it looks like the house is empty.

The covenant is not broken and it is not suspended and it is not on some kind of probation while you get yourself back together. Scripture has God saying for ever in the middle of the worst chapter of the story, and His Spirit inside a believer is the deposit on exactly that, which means the standing you cannot feel tonight is a standing that was never yours to hold in the first place.

And that is the sentence that will let you go back to the notebook without shame. You are not returning in order to be reinstated. You are returning to somebody who never moved.

The nothing you felt by the bins

One more thing, and it is the one nobody has heard said out loud.

You waited to feel awful and you felt nothing, and the nothing frightened you more than guilt would have. I want to take the weight out of that, carefully and without flattering you.

Numbness after eleven days of hospital corridors and a house move is not a spiritual verdict. It is a nervous system that has run out. Elijah under the tree was given bread and sleep before he was given a word, and the order of those was not an accident. What you read as the absence of God was, at least in part, the absence of sleep.

But even where it is more than that, hear the actual state of things: you are held in this by the One who swore it, on the days you feel a great deal and on the days you feel absolutely nothing. Hosea 2:19-20 puts the whole weight on His faithfulness, and the Holy Spirit has been the one keeping you through five weeks in which you were, by your own account, keeping nothing whatsoever.