I Skipped A Year To See If It Would Be Noticed

You did not decide it in advance.

That is worth saying first because it matters. There was no moment in the summer where you sat down and resolved to run an experiment on people you love.

What happened was that the time came round and something in you did not move, and by the time you noticed you were not going to, you had already half decided, and the half decision came with a thought attached.

Let us see if anybody says anything.

And nobody did.

Not one person. Not on the day, not the following week, not at any point in the whole of the following year. As far as anybody else was concerned there was no gap at all.

And you have been living with two things since. The result, which is one thing. And the fact that you ran it at all, which is worse.

There is a psalm where somebody says out loud exactly what you found, and nobody in the book corrects him for it.

No man that would know me

Here it is.

I looked on my right hand, and beheld, but there was no man that would know me: refuge failed me; no man cared for my soul. (Psalm 142:4, King James Version)

That is about as bleak as anything in the book and it is left standing exactly as it is.

No man that would know me. Refuge failed me. No man cared for my soul. Three sentences, each one worse than the last, and nothing anywhere in the psalm walking any of it back.

You have found something that is written down in the book without one word of correction, and the Holy Spirit is the one who left them there. Psalm 142:4 lets all three of those sentences stand rather than qualifying any of them, and He left them for people who have just discovered something similar.

And notice the first phrase, because it is the one that describes what you did.

I looked on my right hand, and beheld. He looked. He checked. He turned deliberately to see who was there.

That is not a noble activity and the psalm does not pretend it is. It is a man in a bad place doing the thing that people in bad places do, which is to look round and find out.

You have been doing what that man did, and it is written that he looked and beheld rather than that he waited patiently to find out. The Spirit of God is the one who allowed that looking into the record, and it is in there as something a person does.

And here is what the psalm does with the finding, which is the important part.

It does not fix it. Nobody arrives. The psalm goes on to say I cried unto thee, O LORD, and it moves the whole matter somewhere else without resolving anything about the people.

You are not going to get that first thing repaired, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a person somewhere else when a finding cannot be undone. His word moves the man to God rather than producing anybody on his right hand, and this finding cannot be undone.

What the test actually was

Now let me say what actually got run here, because it keeps getting called a test and it was not quite one.

It was a question you could not ask out loud.

The question is: do I matter here for any reason other than what I bring. And there is no way to ask that question of a room. Not one. There is no sentence available in any language that asks it without the asking destroying the answer.

You have been asking the only way that was available, and it is written that the man looked on his right hand rather than asking anybody a question. The Spirit of God is the one who understands what a person is doing when they cannot ask something, and He has never once called that manipulation.

And here is the thing about the answer you got, which is worth handling carefully.

A silence is not a verdict. People do not mention absences. They notice them and then do not know what to say and then the moment passes and then it would be strange to raise it four weeks later.

Almost nobody in the world says, you did not send anything this year. There is no polite way to say it.

You have a silence rather than an answer, and the Holy Spirit is the one who knows the difference between nothing being said and nothing being noticed. Scripture records what one man found on one bad day rather than what was true about everybody in his life, and the two are not the same thing.

And the shame about having run it, said plainly.

You did not do a cruel thing. Nobody was harmed. A year happened in which somebody did not give something, which is a year most people have had at some point for far less thoughtful reasons.

You are carrying a shame that has nothing underneath it, and it is written as a man looking around a room rather than as a man doing something to anybody. The Spirit of God is the one who weighs an act rather than a motive alone, and the act was one quiet year.

Go back, and ask it properly

So here is what to do, and there are two halves and the first one is easy.

Go back to giving. This year, the same as you always did, with nothing adjusted and nothing withheld and no trace of the year that was skipped.

You are able to go back without explaining anything, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets somebody back to a thing they stepped out of. Psalm 142:4 moves the man onward rather than having him settle accounts with the room, and stepping back in is far less remarkable to everybody else than it feels.

And the second half is the question, asked properly this time, to one person.

Not to the room. The room cannot answer it. To one person, and not the person the test was mostly about, and in words rather than in an absence.

Something like: I want to ask you something odd. Do you think I would be missed around here if I stopped doing things for people.

You have an actual sentence available to you now, and it is written that the man cried unto the LORD rather than continuing to look at his right hand. The Spirit of God is the one who gets a question out of somebody's mouth after a year of it being asked in another currency, and He has the person in mind already.

And expect the answer to be almost dismissive, because it usually is.

They will say something like, what on earth are you talking about, and they will say it warmly and slightly bewildered, and that bewilderment is most of the answer.

You are likely to be told this in about four words, and the Holy Spirit is the one who supplies a plain answer through somebody who does not understand the question. The written word puts the crying out to God in the next line rather than waiting for anybody in the room, and those are usually the best ones.

And then do not run it again.

Not because it was wicked. Because you have now had the experience of getting a silence back, and a silence is what that method returns every time, and there is nothing else in it for anybody.

You are finished with that method, and it is written that the man looked once and then turned his face somewhere else entirely. The Spirit of God is the one who closes a way of asking that cannot work, and closing it is a mercy rather than a rebuke.