Not One Evening I Was In

Her nephew asked it at the table, the way a nineteen year old asks a thing, with no idea that he is opening a door: what was the best night of your year?

Everybody went around. Her sister said the night the power was out and they played cards by the stove. The nephew said a night in June he would not give details about, and everybody laughed at him. Her brother in law said the fish fry. And then it came to her, and she said something pleasant about the fish fry too, and it was not true, and she got up to put the kettle on so nobody would look at her.

Because she went back through the whole year, right there at the table with her hand on the kettle, month by month, and she could not find one.

Not one bad year. That is the thing. It was a good year. There was a wedding in it. There was a week at the lake. There was the evening the whole family was on the porch and somebody got the guitar out, and she remembers that it happened. She remembers it the way you remember a photograph of a place, which is not the same as remembering the place. She was there. She was not in it.

She was in the next one. That is what she was doing all year, every evening, standing in the current one with her attention already gone out ahead: what has to be ready by Thursday, whether the paperwork got sent, what she should have said to her daughter in law in April, whether there is enough of everything for tomorrow. It is not that she was miserable. She was busy in a way that looks from the outside exactly like living.

Now she is outside on the hill above the house because she said she needed some air. The valley is going blue underneath her. The kitchen window has come on yellow down there and she can see people moving in it. It is the end of the year, the last week of it, and the light is nearly gone off the top of the ridge and she is standing in the cold with her coat half buttoned and one thought going around.

Twelve months. Fifty-two weeks. Three hundred and sixty-five evenings, every one of them handed to her, and she cannot name one that she was in.

And under it, the sentence that is the real reason she came out on this hill. If I did that with this year, I have done it with all of them. That is what my life has been. Not lost, not wasted, nobody would call it either of those things from the outside. Just missed. Attended and not entered.

The last of the light goes off the far ridge while she is standing there. She sees it go.

Maybe you are on your own hill tonight, or in a car in a driveway with the engine off, or at a window. Somebody asked you a friendly question and you went looking and came back empty, and you have been carrying that ever since and have not told anybody.

Where the psalm puts the crown

I want to read you a line before you decide anything about your year, because I think you are about to sentence yourself with it.

Thou crownest the year with thy goodness; and thy paths drop fatness.Psalm 65:11

Read the first word after the semicolon out loud. Thy. Thy goodness, thy paths. Now read the verb. Crownest. He does it. The crowning of a year is not an achievement of the person living through it. It is something God does to a year, and He does it whether or not the person inside was paying attention.

That is the sentence I want under your feet before anything else, because you are standing on that hill about to hand down a verdict on twelve months, and you have quietly assumed that a year is only crowned if you were present enough to notice. It is not. He crowns it. It is His goodness and it is His paths and the fatness falls off them wherever He has walked, including down the road you drove without seeing it.

You are looking at a crowned year, and the crown was never yours to put on it. I am not saying that to let you off something. Psalm 65:11 makes God the one doing the crowning and calls the goodness His, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes that grammar and stands a woman up with it on a cold hill at the end of December.

Now let me name what actually happened to you this year, because I do not think it is what you have been calling it.

You were not absent. You were forward. Every evening you were standing in, your attention had already gone out to the next one, checking whether it was going to be all right. That is not carelessness about your life. In almost everyone I have ever met, it is the opposite. It is a person trying very hard to make sure nothing goes wrong for the people they love, and paying for that with the room they were standing in.

You were never careless with your own life, and that is not what has been happening on those evenings. The written word calls the year crowned by His goodness and not by our attendance, and the Holy Spirit is the One who tells the difference between a woman who did not care and a woman who was out ahead making sure everybody would be fed.

Tonight is inside the year He crowned

Here is the second half of the verse and it is the half that gets you off the hill.

His paths drop fatness. Wherever He goes, richness falls off Him onto the ground. Not once a year. Not at the wedding and the week at the lake. Wherever the path runs.

Which means the evening you are standing in right now, on a cold hill in the last week of a year, with your coat half buttoned and the kitchen window lit up below you, is on one of those paths. This is not the leftover evening at the end of the ones you missed. It is not the consolation. It is an evening God is crowning with His goodness while you stand in it.

And I want to be careful here, because this is exactly where a page like this usually goes wrong. I am not going to hand you a practice. There is no evening routine at the bottom of this. I am not asking you to become a present sort of person, or to do this every night, or to start noticing things on purpose, and I am certainly not going to ask you next week how it went. All of that would turn the one thing you can actually have tonight into the three hundred and sixty-sixth item on a list you are already carrying.

You have this evening, and it is not an assignment. Psalm 65:11 says His paths drop fatness, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes an ordinary cold hour on a hillside into a place where that is actually landing.

There is one more thing in that psalm worth having. A few lines earlier it says that God visits the earth and waters it, that He greatly enriches it, that He prepares the corn. It is a psalm about a God who does the work of the year while people sleep and rise and go about it. The little hills rejoice on every side, it says. Nobody asked the hills to be present. They were rejoicing anyway, because of what was being done to the ground they were standing on.

You are standing on ground He has been enriching the whole time you were out ahead of yourself. It is written that He visits the earth and waters it and crowns the year with His goodness, and the Holy Spirit is the One who lets a person find that out at the end rather than the beginning and lose nothing by the timing.