The Letter She Had Already Written

She wrote it three days before.

Not as a superstition and not to tempt anything. She wrote it because she was so completely certain of what was about to happen that it seemed to her the natural thing to do, and because she wanted to say it properly and she knew she would be too full of it afterwards to write well.

It is a thank you letter. Two sides. It names people.

It is in the second drawer of that desk and it has been there for a long time.

She cannot throw it away. She has tried, twice, and both times put it back, and she cannot fully explain that even to herself.

She also cannot read it. That she can explain, and would not.

Here is what she has never told anybody, including the two people who would sit with her while she did.

It is not the letter that is the problem.

It is that when she wrote it she was more certain of God than she has ever been about anything in her life, and it was a good certainty, and it did her nothing but good for the weeks it lasted, and she cannot now work out what to do with the fact that a feeling that pure turned out to be about the wrong week.

If there is something in a drawer in your house, come and sit down. Nobody is going to ask you to open it.

The object of the verb is a Person

There is a sentence written by a man at the end of a life that had gone almost entirely differently from how he had planned it, and the second word is the load-bearing one.

For I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.2 Timothy 1:12

Whom. Not what.

Paul had every opportunity to be careless there. He is writing from a prison at the end of an itinerary that did not go to plan, to a young man who needed reassurance, and the natural thing would have been to say I know what I believe.

He does not. He puts a Person as the object of the verb, and everything that follows in the sentence is about that Person's capability rather than his own accuracy.

Which locates precisely where your certainty went wrong, and precisely where it did not.

You are still standing in what you were actually standing in, and it was never a week. 2 Timothy 1:12 makes the object of faith a Person rather than an expectation, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that fastened in somebody whose expectation has just failed, which means what came apart was a schedule and it did not reach the foundation.

The certainty was not a lie, and it was not wasted

Now the thing that has never once been said out loud, which is the actual weight in that drawer.

You were more certain of God then than you have ever been, and it was pure, and it turned out to be attached to the wrong week. So let me separate two things that have been welded together in you since. The certainty about God was not false. It did you nothing but good, you said so yourself, and everything you were certain about Him remains true this afternoon: He is good, He is able, He had not forgotten you. Not one of those was disproved by a Tuesday.

You were right about God the whole time, and a wrong week has no power to reach back and unmake that. 2 Timothy 1:12 has Paul saying I know whom I have believed and putting a Person where a schedule would go, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a believer persuaded when a date falls over, which means the certainty in that drawer was aimed at the right object and only ever missed the calendar.

The certainty about timing was wrong. That is a different sentence about a different object, and it failed, and I am not going to soften that because you would stop reading.

You have not been shown that your faith was foolish, and one wrong object does not contaminate the rest. Lamentations 3:22 says it is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed and that His compassions fail not, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a thing a person can put weight on the morning after, which means what you felt was not a false feeling. It was a true thing pointed at a date.

And I am not going to tell you why it did not happen. Nobody knows. Anybody offering you a reason from outside your life is guessing and will go home afterwards.

You have been held all the way through, including the years the drawer stayed shut. Isaiah 41:10 says fear thou not, for I am with thee; be not dismayed, for I am thy God, and it is His Spirit who is called the Comforter, which means a woman who has twice put a letter back was not alone at that desk either time.

God is the one holding you, and He was holding you on the afternoon you wrote it.