Every January, Every March

Camille has a drawer and she knows exactly what is in it.

Four planners. Two of them expensive. A wall chart, folded, with eleven days filled in. Three notebooks with strong first pages. A laminated card she made herself, once, at some point, with five things on it in her own handwriting.

Every January she starts something.

And she starts it properly. She is not somebody who wants a quick fix and she does not fall for nonsense: she reads about it, she picks well, she buys the thing, and she goes hard. The first two weeks of every year of her adult life have been genuinely impressive and there are people who have told her so.

And every year, somewhere in the first half of March, it is gone.

Not dramatically. There is no day she quits. There is a week where two days get missed, and then a fortnight where she means to pick it back up, and then it is April and the wall chart is behind the door.

Eleven years of this.

And what she has concluded, and she has said it out loud twice, is that she is the kind of person who cannot keep anything.

That is the actual damage. Not the drawer. A woman who has raised two children and held one job for nine years and buried her father and kept a friendship going with somebody who moved abroad has decided, on the evidence of a wall chart, that she cannot keep anything.

Her niece is eighteen and had exams in the spring and asked for help with a timetable.

And Camille sat down with her and built her one, and it was good. It was generous. It had gaps in it. It had two evenings a week with nothing in them at all, on purpose, and a rule that a missed session was not a debt to be paid back.

The girl looked at it and said, "This is so kind."

And then she said, "Do you do this for yourself?"

Camille went and looked in the drawer that night.

And in the third notebook, on a page dated four Januaries ago, in her own handwriting, it says: start smaller.

She had already told herself. Four years ago. And then next January she bought a planner.

Now let me ask you how many Januaries it has been.

Because if this is yours you know the number, and you know the drawer, and there is something in it in your own writing that you have not looked at in years.

Where He put the reset

In the middle of the saddest book in the Bible, a man who has run out of everything says this.

The Lord's lovingkindnesses indeed never cease, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22 to 23

New every morning.

Stop on the interval, because the interval is the whole point and it is the thing everybody quotes past.

Not new every year. Not new at the start of a season, or after a review, or when you have got yourself sorted out and are ready to begin properly.

Every morning. Which is three hundred and sixty-five resets a year, arriving whether or not you asked for one, whether or not yesterday went well, whether or not you are ready.

That is the rhythm God actually built into the world, and it is short on purpose, because He knows the size of the run a person can manage before they need mercy again.

And notice who says it. Jeremiah is not writing that from a good week. He is writing it in the wreckage of a city, in a book of poems about total loss, and the reason it is in that book is that a daily mercy is exactly what a person in wreckage needs and a yearly one is no use to them at all.

So hear this said over you, standing at an open drawer at eleven at night. The reset you have been waiting for arrives tomorrow morning and it will arrive again the morning after that, and eleven Januaries have never once been God's timing for a person starting again. That is written into a poem composed inside a ruin, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who works in a believer to will and to do, and He begins that work on ordinary Tuesdays without waiting for a date.

Now let me take the blame off you, because I think you have been carrying it a long time.

You did not fail eleven times.

You attempted, eleven times, something that was too big, on a date with no mercy in it, using a design that had no allowance for the ordinary fact that some days go wrong. And then you graded yourself on the scaffolding rather than on the building.

Here is what I mean. Every one of those systems had the same fault: a missed day created a debt. Two missed days created a debt you could not pay, and once a thing is unpayable a person stops looking at it. That is not weakness of character. That is what any human being does with a debt they cannot clear.

You built for your niece the thing you have never built for yourself. Gaps in it. No debt for a missed session. Two evenings with nothing in them. You know exactly how to do this and you have never once extended it to you.

The word says His compassions are new every morning and His faithfulness is great, and the greatness in that verse is His steadiness and not yours. And the Spirit of God is the one who works in a person both to will and to do, which means the wanting is His work too, and you have been trying to manufacture in January what He supplies daily.

There is a plain instinct in this tradition worth having here. It never believed that a person could be argued into holiness by a strong enough resolution. It said God begins it, God carries it, God finishes it, and a person's part is to keep turning up to the means He gave. Every bit of that is designed for somebody who fails on a Wednesday and is expected back on the Thursday.