The Week the Diary Emptied

Aisling had spent twenty-two years wishing for a week with nothing in it, and when she finally got one it nearly took her apart.

The sale completed on a Friday. There were two lawyers on a call and a great deal of paperwork and, at the end of it, a sort of embarrassed silence where everybody realized that nobody had planned what to say. Somebody said congratulations. Somebody else said we should all get a drink sometime. The call ended.

She sat in the office she no longer owned and looked at the wall for a while.

Twenty-two years. She had started it in a rented room above a hardware shop with one desk and a kettle that tripped the electrics. She had taken exactly four full holidays in the whole of it. She had a folder on her laptop, still, called ideas, that she had not opened in eleven years and could not bring herself to delete.

On the Monday she got up at ten past six, because that is what her body does, and made coffee, and sat down, and opened her diary out of habit.

It was empty. Not light. Empty. Monday through Friday, nothing, in a way she had genuinely never seen since she was twenty-four years old.

And she waited.

That is the piece nobody warns anybody about. She sat in her own kitchen with a full cup and waited for the relief to arrive, the way you wait for a tide, and after a while she noticed she was waiting and felt foolish and went for a walk she did not enjoy.

It was not sadness. Sadness would have been something she could have sat with. It was a kind of ringing. She had spent twenty-two years in a room with a very loud noise in it, and somebody had turned the noise off, and it turned out the quiet underneath had been there the whole time and was worse.

What got her was Thursday afternoon, in a supermarket, of all places.

There was a woman at the end of the aisle, older, with a basket, who was clearly not going to reach the thing she wanted. And Aisling reached it down and handed it over, and the woman looked at her properly, the way almost nobody does, and said: thanks, love. Are you all right, though? You look like you're miles away.

That was all of it. Are you all right, though.

Aisling stood in an aisle with her hand still half up and found that her face had gone, in a supermarket, on a Thursday, and she could not have explained it to anybody who asked.

She left the trolley. She walked home the long way, along the water. And the sentence that arrived, somewhere near the bridge, had nothing to do with the sale.

She thought: I filled twenty-two years so full that nothing could get in, and now there is room, and I am terrified of what is in here with me.

Let me say the word properly first

Before we go on, I want to be plain about what this site means by wealth, because it is a slippery word and I would rather be honest than impressive with somebody standing on a bridge.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a sale price, not a total on a page. A portion is the old table word for what is set down in front of somebody because they belong at that table, and Scripture takes that plain word and does something remarkable with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only sense the word carries here, and it is not a smaller helping given to the people who did not get the real thing.

And I want to be as plain the other way. Money is not wicked, selling something you built is not a sin, and having wanted the pressure to end is not unspiritual. Nothing on this page ties what God does to what you have or to what you give, and that wire is not run here and never will be. If you are actually short, if there is a date and a figure and a knot in your stomach, that is real and it deserves a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family exists for exactly that. Nothing here is a rebuke for wanting to stop.

What I want to do is much smaller. I want to sit with the ringing in the empty week without hurrying it, and I would rather the word of God named what is in there, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed.

Whom have I in heaven

Asaph writes the seventy-third psalm in the middle of a genuine collapse. It is one of the few places in Scripture where somebody says out loud that the arrangement does not appear to be working, and it is not tidied up afterward.

And then, right at the point where you expect a resolution, he does not resolve anything. He simply turns.

Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.Psalm 73:25-26

Sit with the middle of it, because that is the part that fits an empty diary. My flesh and my heart may fail. He does not promise that they will not. He does not say a good enough person keeps going. He allows, out loud, in a song people still sing, that the thing holding a person up can give way, and then he names something underneath it that does not.

You are not a woman falling apart because she stopped working. You are a person who has come to the end of a very loud noise and can suddenly hear the room, and the written word treats that as an ordinary human event rather than as a failure of nerve. I am not putting my own idea over you here. That is what Scripture says about it, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line written in somebody else's collapse and lands it in a kitchen on a Monday morning at ten past six.

What twenty-two years was covering

Think about what actually got you in that aisle. It wasn't the reaching. Anyone can reach a shelf.

It was: are you all right, though. It was one woman with a basket looking at you properly and asking a real question and waiting for the answer. You were starving to be asked, and you still are, and there is nothing weak or self-indulgent anywhere in that.

And you have a portion right now, on that bridge, before you know what any of the next year looks like. His word calls God the strength of the heart and the portion forever, present tense, not pending, not waiting on you to find a purpose, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact in a body rather than a phrase on a page.

Here is what the word settles about you, so His Spirit can settle it in you this week. You were never worth what the diary said you were worth. Jesus withdrew to quiet places on purpose, repeatedly, in the middle of the most urgent work anybody has ever done, and nobody has ever suggested He was avoiding something. He was in the aisle on Thursday, and on the bridge, and He is not in a hurry about you.