The Last Day Is On The Calendar

You circled it in November and you felt nothing at all.

That is the thing that has bothered you since. Not the date. You have known the date was coming for two years and there is nothing frightening about it.

You put a circle on it with a pen and you sat back and you waited for something to arrive and nothing did.

And you have been waiting since. Some mornings you check.

Here is the worry, and it is not about the ending.

If eleven years ends and a man feels nothing about it, then perhaps there was nothing there. Perhaps it was always just a job, and every time he thought it was more than that he was mistaken, and this flat morning is the truth finally showing up.

That is the actual fear and it is sitting under all of it.

You would not say it to anybody, because said out loud it sounds like a man fishing for reassurance, and you have never once been that.

There is a verse about the numbering of days that says something surprising about who does the numbering.

Teach us to number our days

Moses ends a psalm about how short a life is with a request.

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. (Psalm 90:12, King James Version)

Teach us to number. He asks to be taught it.

That is a strange thing to ask about arithmetic. Anybody can count. What he is asking for is the capacity to weigh a stretch of time properly, and he is asking because it does not come naturally to a person.

You have been asking for something that has to be taught rather than felt, and the Holy Spirit is the one who teaches it. Psalm 90:12 puts the numbering in the category of a thing God does in a person, and He has not finished teaching it to anybody yet.

Now what that says about November.

You circled a date and waited for a feeling, on the assumption that a feeling is how a man knows what eleven years were worth.

Moses does not treat it that way. He asks to be taught, which means the weighing of years is a thing that gets learned and worked at, and not a thing that arrives on its own when a date gets circled.

You have not failed to feel something you should have felt, and it is written teach us to number our days rather than let us feel our days. The Spirit of God is the one who does the teaching, and Psalm 90 puts it entirely in His hands rather than in a man's chest.

And notice what the numbering is for.

That we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. It is not so that a person can be moved. It is so that the heart gets applied to something.

That is an active outcome. The numbering leads to a doing rather than to an emotion.

You are being led toward an act rather than toward a feeling, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a person there. Scripture puts the applying of the heart on the far side of the numbering, and Psalm 90:12 does not have a feeling anywhere in it.

Numbness is not a verdict

Let me deal with the flatness directly, because it deserves better than a reframe.

Eleven years of running a place is a long stretch of being the one who is steady. Steady is a trained thing. It gets built by hundreds of days where a man decides not to react.

And a man who has built that for eleven years does not get to switch it off for a circle on a calendar. It is not a tap.

So the flatness in November is not evidence that nothing was there. It is evidence of exactly what was there: a man who trained himself for eleven years not to be moved by what happens in that building.

You are looking at the result of the years rather than at the absence of them, and it is written that the numbering has to be taught rather than felt. The Spirit of God is the one who built that steadiness, and He is not going to interpret it against you.

And there is one practical thing that will do more than any amount of waiting.

Feeling does not arrive from a date. A date is an abstraction. Nobody has ever felt anything about a number in a square.

Feeling arrives from a place. Standing in an actual doorway where an actual thing happened is a completely different operation from looking at a calendar, and it works on people whose steadiness has been trained for eleven years.

You have somewhere to stand rather than something to wait for, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the teaching. Scripture asks for the numbering to be taught rather than for it to descend, and He does it in a place rather than at a desk.

Stand in one doorway

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

Pick one doorway in that building. The one where something actually happened.

Stand in it for a minute and say out loud one thing that happened in that particular spot. One sentence.

You are standing somewhere rather than waiting for something, and Psalm 90:12 asks for the numbering to be taught in a person. The Spirit of God is the one who is in that doorway, and He was there when the thing happened.

Then go and do the next one another day if you want to. And if nothing arrives in that minute either, that is not a failure and you are not going to conclude anything from it.

Because the point is not the feeling. The point is the numbering, and the numbering has begun the moment a man stands in a doorway and says one true sentence out loud about a spot on a floor.

You have already begun the numbering rather than waiting to start it, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the teaching. The written word puts the applying of the heart on the other side of it, and Psalm 90:12 is where the whole request is made.

Then open in the morning, because the date is not today.