It Changes Whether I Am Ready Or Not

You noticed the tree on Tuesday.

Same tree. Same walk. The one at the bend where the wall stops, that you have gone past twice a day for years without registering that it exists.

And on Tuesday you looked at it, and it had turned. Not a little. All the way, the whole crown of it, and you had not seen it happen.

You saw that tree in August. You have seen it every day since. And somewhere in the last five weeks it changed completely, in front of you, and the change went past without your noticing one single day of it.

That is the thing that has stayed with you all week, and I do not think it is really about the tree.

You have been in a season you did not pick. It has gone on longer than you expected and there is no announced end to it, and you have got into the habit of measuring time by how long this has been going on rather than by anything else.

So the tree was a small shock, because it said: five weeks have passed out here, in the world, doing what they do, and you were not in any of them.

This is the last article on this site, and I want to be careful about what I do with a turning tree, because there is an obvious move and it is wrong.

I am not going to tell you it is a sign.

Not that your season is turning because the leaves did. Not that God arranged that tree for you on Tuesday. Weather is not a message and the calendar is not a promise, and the moment I make a tree into a signal about your life, I have taught you to read the sky for information about yourself, and that is a bad way to live and it will hurt you the first mild winter.

What I have is smaller and more solid: the order itself.

Seedtime and harvest shall not cease

There is a promise made after the flood, and what makes it remarkable is how little it promises.

While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease. (Genesis 8:22, King James Version)

Seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night.

Four pairs, and each pair has an easy half and a hard half, and both halves are promised.

Notice that. Cold is in there with heat. Winter is promised the same as summer. Night is in the list beside day. This is not a promise of good weather, and it is not a promise that the hard half gets shorter. It is a promise that the order continues: that both halves keep coming, in their turn, and neither one is the end of the arrangement.

And notice the terms of it. While the earth remaineth. Not while people are faithful. Not while a generation deserves it. The promise is attached to the earth continuing, and to nothing about anybody's conduct, which is a striking thing to say immediately after a flood.

So the order is not conditional on you.

It does not wait for you to be ready. It did not pause for the last eight months while you were dealing with what you have been dealing with. The seedtime went ahead. The cold came and went. That tree turned in front of you whether or not you had the capacity to look at it.

And that is the thing I want you to have from this whole site: the world you live in has a keeping order in it that runs on something other than your participation.

The order runs on something other than your readiness, and it has never once waited to see whether you were able to keep up. Genesis 8:22 promises the hard half of every pair alongside the easy one and attaches the promise to nothing anybody does, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody standing at a bend in a wall looking up at a tree.

Both halves are in the promise

Here is the practical half, and it is about which pair you are in.

You have been treating this season as a fault in the arrangement.

That is what the last months have quietly become. Not just hard, but wrong: a stretch that should not be happening, that has gone on past its allotted time, and that is evidence something has broken in how your life is supposed to run.

But look at the list again. Cold is in the promise. Winter is in the promise, at the same level and with the same guarantee as summer. Nobody in that verse treats the cold half as a malfunction. It is one of the two things that are promised to keep happening.

That does not make your season pleasant and I am not going to say it does. Winter is genuinely cold and things do not grow in it. That is not a bright side.

What it does is take the wrongness out of it. You are in the half of the pair that is hard, which is a place inside the order rather than a failure of it, and the order has both halves in it by design.

And here is what that changes today, which is the only reason I raise it.

If this season is a malfunction, then you have to fix it, and every day it continues is another day of failing to. If it is the cold half, then you are in it, and the work is to live in it, and living in it is a completely different job from fixing it.

You have been doing the second job for months and it does not exist.

You are in the hard half of a pair rather than in a fault in the arrangement, and the cold has never once been outside the promise. The written word puts winter and night into the same promise as summer and day, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody who has been trying to fix a season.

Stand outside and notice one thing

So here is the last assignment on this site, and it takes two minutes.

Stand outside once this week and notice one thing that has changed since last month.

Once. Outside. Two minutes.

And look for one thing that is different from a month ago. The tree at the bend. The time it is dark by. What the light does on the wall in the afternoon. Whether there is anything on the ground that was not there. The sound at six in the morning.

One thing. And then go back in.

Here is what this is not, so that you do not do the wrong thing with it.

It is not a nature exercise and it is not gratitude practice. You do not have to appreciate it. You do not have to feel lifted, and if you go out and notice that it is dark by half past four and think that is grim, you have done the assignment correctly.

It is an act of observation, and the reason it matters is what it puts you back into contact with.

For months your evidence about how time is passing has come entirely from your own situation, which does not appear to be moving. That is why the tree was a shock: it was the first external report you had received in a while, and it said that five weeks had genuinely gone by.

Standing outside and noticing one changed thing is a way of getting a second witness. The world will tell you, quite plainly, that time is moving out here, in an order that has not stopped, and it will tell you that without asking you to feel any particular way about it.

And this is the last word from this site: the sky keeps turning and it never once needed you to be ready for it. That is not a promise about your situation. It is something better and quieter, which is that the arrangement you live inside is being kept by somebody other than you, and it has been kept the whole time you were not looking.

You are able to receive one external report that time is moving, and the order out there has never once required you to feel anything about it. Genesis 8:22 keeps seedtime and harvest running while the earth remains, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody standing outside for two minutes this week.