I Have Stood Here Before

This is the third one.

The first was about nineteen years ago and you were young enough that it frightened you properly. The second was eleven years back and you handled it, and you remember being surprised at how calm you were.

This is the third and you know exactly how it goes.

You know it gets loud for about ten days. You know a few people stop coming and most of those come back inside four months. You know that somebody young on your team will take it personally and need a conversation.

You know the shape of the whole thing, start to finish, and you can see the far end of it from here.

And here is what nobody warned you about.

Knowing the shape is not helping.

You would have assumed, at fifty-nine, that having stood at two of these would make the third one lighter. It has made it flatter, which is a different thing entirely.

The young ones are frightened and you are not, and that is not the relief it sounds like, because underneath the not being frightened there is a kind of tiredness that the first two did not have.

There is a verse about deliberately calling something to mind, and the deliberateness in it is the part that will help you.

This I recall to my mind

Lamentations is a book of grief and in the middle of it there is a hinge.

This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. (Lamentations 3:21, King James Version)

Recall to my mind. That is an act. It is something a person does, deliberately, with effort.

He does not say hope arrived. He does not say he felt better. He says he called a thing to mind, and that because he did, there was hope.

You have something to do rather than something to wait for, and the Holy Spirit is the one who works in that order. Lamentations 3:21 makes the recalling deliberate and the hope a consequence of it, and He has been waiting for you to do the first half.

Now the difference between that and what you have been doing, because you have been recalling plenty.

The thing being recalled has been the shape. The ten loud days, the four months, the conversation with the young one. That is knowledge and it is accurate and it is not what the verse is about.

What he recalls is not the shape of the trouble. Read the verses on either side: it is the mercies of God, which are new every morning. He recalls what was given, not what happened.

You have been calling the wrong thing to mind, and it is written that what gets recalled is the mercy rather than the pattern. The Spirit of God is the one who was in the first two, and Lamentations 3 puts the recalling on Him rather than on the sequence.

And that is exactly why the shape has gone flat on you.

The shape is a weather forecast. It tells you what is coming and it gives you nothing at all to stand on, because a pattern is not a person and a pattern has never once helped anybody at fifty-nine.

You are able to call something to mind that a pattern cannot give you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who supplies the thing worth recalling. Scripture puts the hope after the recalling rather than after the trouble, and He supplied it twice already.

What came out of the first two

Let me be specific, because the recalling has to be specific or it does nothing.

Something came out of the first one. Not in the numbers. In you, or in a person, or in that building.

Somebody stayed who would not have stayed. Somebody said a sentence in that building that has never once been forgotten. Something about a woman's own steadiness got learned that had not been known at forty.

And something came out of the second one too, and you could name it in about nine seconds if somebody asked you directly.

You have two specific things to recall that a pattern does not contain, and it is written that the recalling is what produces the hope. The Spirit of God is the one who put those things there, and Lamentations 3:21 is why naming them matters more than knowing the sequence.

And here is the tiredness, and it is worth naming honestly.

The flatness is not a failure of faith and it is not age. It is what happens when a person has been through a thing twice and has never once gone back and collected what came out of it.

Two rounds of getting through something and no deliberate recalling of what was given, and the third round arrives with knowledge and nothing to stand on.

You are not tired because you are fifty-nine, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that act work. The written word puts the remedy in a deliberate act rather than in a feeling, and Lamentations 3 has a man doing it in the middle of a book of grief.

Say what came out of the last one

So here is the thing to do, and it takes about a minute.

Say out loud one specific thing that came out of the last one. Eleven years ago. Name it.

Not the shape. Not that it passed. A specific thing: a person, a sentence somebody said to you, something that got built in that building or in you because of it.

Then say out loud that it was given rather than earned.

You are recalling on purpose rather than waiting to feel something, and Lamentations 3:21 says this I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. The Spirit of God is the one who supplies what the recalling finds, and He supplied it eleven years ago.

The reason it has to be out loud and specific is that a general sense that things worked out before is exactly what has gone flat.

A named thing is different. It is evidence rather than a forecast, and evidence about a person is something a woman of fifty-nine can actually stand on in the middle of round three.

You have been given evidence rather than a pattern, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the rest of it. It is written that the hope comes after the calling to mind, and Lamentations 3:21 is the whole method.

Then open in the morning and go and have the conversation with the young one who is frightened.