The Season They Always Run

The calendar on her kitchen wall still says March.

She has not turned it, and it is the last week of August. There is a reason and it is not laziness. March is the month her father died, and turning the page felt like agreeing to something, so the page has stayed where it is, and every morning she makes coffee under a picture of a covered bridge and a grid of squares that stopped mattering.

The rest of the year kept its own schedule. In June the plant cut her shift from five days to three. In July the truck started making a noise that a man at the shop described, at length, as a transmission. She has stopped saying the sentence out loud, the one that begins with this year, because people's faces do a thing when she says it.

Then Wednesday, and the smell.

It comes over the trees from down the road where the smokehouses are, that particular sweet woodsmoke that only happens for about three weeks a year, and she knows exactly what it means, and she pulls the blind down over the sink.

Thursday morning somebody knocks.

It is the old man from two houses along, seventy-something, in the same brown jacket he has worn since anyone can remember, with an empty bucket in each hand and river gravel in the treads of his boots.

"They're in," he says. "They came in Tuesday night."

She stands in the doorway with a dish towel and says the thing she has been practicing all summer. That she is not really in the mood this year. That he should go on. That she is not exactly in a celebrating frame of mind, given, you know.

He listens to all of it. He does not argue with one word.

Then he says, "It doesn't need you to be having a good year."

She looks at him.

"It's not a party you're throwing," he says. "They come because they come. They came the year my wife died and I sat on the bank and watched them and did nothing else. They'll come next August whether either one of us is standing there."

And then he picks up his buckets and goes, because he is seventy-something and the light is good and the fish are in the river.

That evening she finds something folded into the screen door where the frame is split. It is the back of a feed store receipt. On it, in pencil, in handwriting that goes uphill: a date, ten days out. And under the date, two words.

First light.

She stands in the doorway holding it for longer than she means to. Then she goes into the kitchen, and she turns the calendar from March to August, and she writes the date in the little square with a pen from the drawer, and she leaves the calendar hanging on its nail where she will walk past it about forty times before then.

The appointments were made before your year started

Something in you decided that looking forward is for other people.

Not in words. It happened quietly, somewhere between the phone call and the third month, and it went like this: people whose lives are going well get to be excited about things, and yours has plainly not been going well, so anticipation was set down along with the calendar page.

Look at where the appointments actually come from.

He appointed the moon for seasons: the sun knoweth his going down.Psalm 104:19

The moon is on an appointment. That is what the verse says, and God is the one who set it, and it has been keeping that appointment over every good year and every ruined year that anybody has ever had. It kept it over your March. It is keeping it tonight.

And back at the beginning, in Genesis 1, the lights in the sky are put there for signs and for seasons, which in the Hebrew is closer to appointed meetings than to weather. He hung a clock in the sky before there was a single person under it to be too sad to look up.

You are invited to what is on that clock, and that is already true rather than pending. Leviticus 23 calls those days His own appointed times, in His own voice, and it is His Spirit and not anybody's enthusiasm that makes a date on a wall start to mean something again.

Now notice what He calls them. Not your feasts. My feasts. The possessive is doing a great deal of work in that chapter: they belong to Him, they were set by Him, and they arrive on His schedule. Which means the one thing they cannot be is a measure of you.

And here is what I am not going to do, and what this whole site will not do.

I am not going to tell you which of those days anybody is obliged to keep. That argument belongs to other rooms and it has cost enough people their gladness already. Keep none of them and nothing here puts you outside, because nothing said here stands on your attendance. What is being handed over is not another column of duties. It is the news that the year has His appointments in it, and that the welcome at them has your name on it.

Because a rehearsal is not a performance. A rehearsal is a promise about a performance.

That is what those days always were: dress rehearsals for something real, run year after year by people who did not yet know the date of the opening night. Passover was rehearsed for centuries and then a Lamb was given, and the rehearsal turned out to have been a description all along. The rest of them lean forward in the same direction. Something is coming. The calendar is not a circle, it is an arrow.

So the gladness is yours and it is not on loan against your performance, because what is written is that these are His appointed times and He is the one who keeps them, and His Spirit is at work putting expectancy back into a chest that has been flat since March.

The old man was right, and he was right in the way that only someone who has sat on a bank in a bad year can be. The run does not need you to be doing well. It is not your achievement and it never was. It comes because He said seasons, and it will be there.