The Paper Chain On The Door

Dana found it on the back of the front door on a Tuesday in the third week of September, at ten to eight, with her keys already in her hand.

Twenty-two loops. Green and orange and a sort of mustard yellow, cut out of the seed catalog that lives under the phone, glued in a chain and taped at the top with about four inches of packing tape because Jonah does not believe in using a small amount of anything.

He was seven. He was sitting on the mat putting his shoes on the wrong feet.

"What's this, bud?"

"It's a countdown."

"Right." She turned it over with one finger. The loops still smelled faintly of glue. "Counting down to what?"

Jonah looked up at it with the expression of somebody being asked an unfair question about their own artwork.

"I don't know yet."

"You don't know."

"No." He went back to the shoes. "But I'll find out."

They had made one in December, the year before. That was the whole point of December for him: the tearing. One loop off every morning before school, the chain getting visibly shorter, the whole house able to see how close the thing was. He had been unbearable about it in the best way. And then it was the sixth of January and the chain was gone and the tree went out on the sidewalk with the others, and there had been nothing since.

Nine months. Nothing since.

So he had made another one, out of a seed catalog, for nothing in particular, and taped it to the door, because a year is supposed to have something in it that gets closer.

Dana stood in the hall with her coat on and her keys biting into her palm and did an honest inventory of the next twelve months, which is not a thing she recommends doing at ten to eight.

The inspection sticker. The dentist twice. Two birthdays and her mother's, three days apart in April. A week in August she books in February. And underneath all of it, the low steady hum of maintenance, of things kept going, of the year turning over the way an engine turns over.

Not one appointment in it was His.

Not one. Not a single day in three hundred and sixty-five that she had set aside because God had asked to meet her there. She had a faith. She would have said so on a form. And her year had exactly the same shape it would have had if she had none, and a seven-year-old with a glue stick had just put his finger on the hole without knowing there was one.

She got in the car. She sat there a second before starting it.

If your year also goes round and round and there is nothing in it with His name on it, and if some part of you has quietly stopped expecting anything ahead, I would like to stand in the hall with you and look at the door. Because He put appointments in a year. He always did. And nobody has ever taken you through them as invitations.

He put meetings in the year and He put His name on them

Start with the fact that it was His idea, which is the part that gets lost.

Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, These are the appointed feasts of the LORD that you shall proclaim as holy convocations; they are my appointed feasts.Leviticus 23:2

Read whose they are. He says it twice in one verse, as if He knows it will get reassigned. The appointed feasts of the LORD. They are my appointed feasts. Not the nation's traditions, not a religious calendar somebody built later. Meetings, on dates, set by God, with His own name written across the top of them.

The phrase underneath the English is about a fixed time to meet. An appointment. A time both parties know about in advance, because a meeting only works if the other person knows when.

And every single one of them was a feast. Not an inspection. Not a filing. A feast, which is a thing you get to go to, with food in it and people in it, and in most cases the instruction was to stop working, which is God writing a day off into somebody's year on purpose.

You are invited, and that is a word chosen carefully. Leviticus calls them holy convocations, which means called-together days, and the calling is His. It is not an obligation you have failed to notice for twenty years. What is written calls them called-together days, and His Spirit is stirring something in you right now that you might as well call hunger.

Now the thing that makes them more than a nice rhythm.

Every one of them leaned forward. Passover was not a memorial exercise; the whole shape of it, the lamb, the blood, the household coming out, was a rehearsal, and centuries later the thing it was rehearsing walked up to a river and was pointed at. A rehearsal is not a lesser event. A rehearsal is an event that exists because something is coming.

Which means the year God designed had anticipation built into its architecture. Not once, several times, spread through the seasons: something ahead, then something ahead, then something ahead, all of them leaning in one direction like grass before wind.

And here is the direction.

waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.Titus 2:13

There it is. The end of the chain. Paul does not write hoping vaguely and he does not write bracing. He writes waiting, the way you wait for a person, and he calls the thing being waited for blessed and puts a face on it.

You have something ahead. That is not a mood I am trying to generate in you, it is the tense Titus is written in. Looking forward is not a thing a grown adult manufactures. His Spirit hands it back.

Now let me say the thing you have been half braced for since the third paragraph, because it belongs here and it belongs plainly.

I am not going to tell you which of His appointed times are yours to keep, and this page is not going to sort you into a camp about it. Believers who love God have carried that conversation a long time and they can carry it somewhere else. Nobody reading this is outside for having kept none of them, and nobody reading this earns anything by starting. Your standing was settled by a Lamb and it does not move on a calendar question.

What has been taken from you is not obedience. It is anticipation, and that is a real loss and it has a real remedy, and no one is going to charge you for the remedy.

Children still have it. Jonah taped twenty-two loops to a door for nothing at all, because he can still feel that a year is supposed to have something in it. He was not wrong. He was just early, and he was looking for what somebody had already put there.