The Same Eight Weeks

Kekoa goes flat every year and every year he thinks it is new.

Not depressed, he would say, and I am not going to argue with him about the word because I am not in the room and it is not mine to name. Flat. He gets up, he goes, he does the work, and for about eight weeks it is like walking uphill in wet sand, and everything takes twice the effort and returns half.

And every year, without fail, he responds to it the same way.

He decides he has let something slip.

He goes back over the last few months looking for the failure. He gets stricter with himself. He gets up earlier, cuts things out, adds things in, and works the eight weeks harder than he works any other eight weeks of the year, which is the exact opposite of what a man in wet sand needs.

And then it lifts.

And he attributes the lifting to the extra effort, files the whole thing under a bad patch he pulled himself out of, and forgets about it entirely, because that is what you do with a thing you have decided was a failure.

Twelve months later he does it again.

Leilani keeps a work diary. Not a journal, nothing personal in it: jobs, dates, who owed what, weather sometimes.

And she went back through five of them.

It is the same eight weeks. Not roughly. The same weeks, five years running, with maybe ten days of drift either side, and it is written in there in his own hand without him ever having noticed, because he never went looking for a pattern in something he had classified as a personal failing.

She put five diaries on the kitchen table open at the same page.

And he stood there and did not say anything for a while, and then he said, "It has a shape."

Now let me ask you what time of year yours is.

Because if you have one you probably already know and you have never said it, and you have certainly never written it down, because writing it down would make it a thing that exists rather than a thing that keeps happening to be your fault.

What He promised about the year

The flood is over, and the first thing God says about the world afterward is a sentence about rhythm.

While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.Genesis 8:22

Read what He is guaranteeing.

Not good weather. Not a good year. Not that every season will be productive, and He specifically names the ones that are not: cold, winter, night. Three of the six things He promises are the empty half of a pair.

And He names them as a promise. They are not the failure of the system. They are the system.

Seedtime is not harvest. Seedtime is the part where you put good grain into the ground and it disappears and nothing at all shows for months, and any farmer who judged their competence by what the field looked like in seedtime would quit every year in the same week.

So hear this said over you, standing over five diaries open at the same page. The low stretch that arrives on schedule is a season and not a verdict, and eight weeks of walking in wet sand has never once meant that you let something slip. That is written into the promise God made about the world after the flood, and it is the Holy Spirit who is at work in a believer in every part of the year, and He does not stop in winter, because winter is not His absence, it is the world doing exactly what He said it would do.

Now let me be careful with you, because I could do damage here in two directions.

I am not telling you what your eight weeks are.

If there is something in them that a doctor should look at, go and see one, and this article will still be here afterward, and nothing in it is asking you to sit through something on your own that other people are trained to help with. A man of God who tells you to pray about it and not to ask anybody is giving you advice that costs him nothing and might cost you a great deal.

And I am not telling you to lie down and wait for it to pass either. Some of what you do in those weeks is right. Getting up is right.

Here is the only thing I am saying, and it is one word.

Name it.

You have been meeting the same visitor every year for five years and treating it as a stranger every single time, and that is the whole reason it costs you what it costs you. You spend the first two weeks not knowing what is happening, and the next three deciding it is your fault, and the last three exhausting yourself trying to correct a failure that is not there.

Named, it is eight weeks. Unnamed, it is eight weeks plus the belief that you are the problem, and the second part is heavier than the first.

And notice this, because it is the thing that will actually change your next one: the lifting was not the extra effort. It lifted the year before too, and the year before that, in more or less the same week, and one of those years you did nothing different at all.

The word says He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, which is a sentence about God being unsurprised by the limits of a body. And the Spirit of God is the one who helps in our weakness, which is a word about strength that is not there, and it is God's own vocabulary for a person who has less than they need.

This tradition has never been sentimental about that. It wrote down that the whole creation moves in an order that God set and holds, and that a person is not the author of their own weather. There is a great deal of freedom in that, and none of it is fatalism: you are still going to get up, you are just going to stop filing the winter as a fault.