I Could Not Tell You What Year That Was

Someone asked Freya how she had been and she genuinely could not answer.

Not because it was bad. She would tell you it has been fine. Nothing has happened, in the sense of nothing arriving on the doorstep and nothing falling over, and that is more or less the shape of the last three years.

The reason she could not answer is that she has no units.

She stood there and tried to think of something that had happened, so she could say since then, and there was nothing to put a since on. Not a move, not a job change, not a big trip, not a diagnosis. Just weeks, in a long row, and she has done all of them well enough.

It came to a head with a photograph.

She was clearing her phone and found one of herself and two friends outside somewhere, in coats, laughing, and she could not place it. Not the year. She looked at the corner of the screen for the date and it said a month she would have guessed was about six months ago and it was twenty-two months ago.

Twenty-two.

And what got her was not that time had gone. Everybody says that. What got her was that she could not have put that photograph in order against anything else in her life. She could not tell you if it was before or after she stopped going to the Thursday thing, or before or after the winter she was ill, because those do not have positions either.

The whole stretch is one long day.

And so she cannot tell whether she is doing better than she was, or worse, or the same, because there is nothing at either end to measure against. She suspects worse. She has no evidence for that. She has no evidence for anything, and a person with no evidence usually assumes the worst about themselves.

Now let me ask you whether you could put last year in order.

Not the events. The order. If somebody handed you six photographs from the last three years, could you lay them out in a line?

He hung markers before there was anyone to read them

Here is a verse most people skim, and it is worth stopping on.

Then God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years."Genesis 1:14

For signs and for seasons and for days and years.

Notice what that sentence is doing. It is not primarily about light, because light already happened three days earlier and the text says so. This is about markers. The sun and the moon are given a job here and the job is to divide an undifferentiated stretch into parts a creature can count.

And here is the detail I want you to have: He does it on the fourth day, and there is nobody yet to read it. Nobody is made until the sixth. He hangs the markers up before there is a single creature on earth who needs them.

That is not an accident of sequence. It is a house being furnished before anybody moves in, and the furniture includes a way of telling what week it is.

So hear this said over you, standing in a kitchen unable to answer a simple question. You were never designed to live in one undivided stretch, and losing track of your own life is not a moral failure, it is what happens to any creature with the markers taken down. That is written into the fourth day of the world, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who brings things to remembrance, and He was given to people who forget, which is everyone.

Now let me be careful, because there are two things I am not going to do.

I am not going to tell you which days to keep.

There are real and long-running disagreements among serious Christians about what a church should mark and how, and they are not going to be settled at the bottom of an article by me, and anybody who tells you they have settled it is not being straight with you. That whole argument is somewhere else and you do not need it today.

And I am not going to hand you a planner.

You have almost certainly tried one. Most people in this situation have three, and the reason they did not work is that a planner is for filling time and your problem is not empty time, it is unmarked time. Those are different problems and the second one does not respond to the first one's tools.

Here is what I am actually saying.

You have been treating markers as decoration.

That is the whole mistake, and it is an easy one, because a marked day looks like sentiment. A candle, a circled date, a thing you do every year at the same time: it looks like something people with more spare capacity than you go in for.

It is not decoration. It is measurement. It is the only way a creature who lives forward can find out where it has been, and without any of it you are not free, you are unable to navigate.

And notice what you did with the missing evidence: you assumed worse. You had no data at all and your mind filled it in against you, which is what a mind does with a blank.

Three marked days across three years would have told you the truth. You might well be doing better. You genuinely do not know, and not knowing has been costing you something every single week.

The word says teach us to number our days, that we may present to You a heart of wisdom, and that is a prayer asking God for the ability to count, which is a strange thing to have to ask for and evidently is not. And the Spirit of God is the one Jesus said would bring to remembrance the things He said, which is a promise made about memory to people who were about to have a very long few years.

There is a plain and unfussy version of this in the tradition this site comes from. One day in seven, which arrives whether or not you noticed the six before it, whether or not you got anything done, whether or not you feel any different from last week. Not a reward for a productive week. A marker in the sky, hung there before you needed it.