This Is The First Thin Year After Many Good Ones

You have never done this before.

That is the strangest part, and it is the part nobody around you understands, because from the outside a thin year is a thin year and plenty of people have had one.

But you have not. Not once. For a long stretch there was always enough and a bit over, and the giving was one of the genuine pleasures of your life, and you were good at it and generous with it and it never cost you a moment's anxiety.

And now there is this year, and you have no practice at all.

You do not know how to hold it. You do not know what to say. You do not know how to walk into a room with less and you have never once had to learn.

And underneath all of that, a sentence has started forming that you have not said to anybody, which is: what was wrong with the last ten years, that this is happening now.

I want to go at that sentence directly, because it is doing more damage than the year is.

If riches increase, set not your heart

Here is the line, and notice who it is talking to.

if riches increase, set not your heart upon them. (Psalm 62:10, King James Version)

That is addressed to somebody in a good year. It is a word for the increase, not for the decrease. It is spoken into abundance and it is a caution about where the heart rests.

Which means the psalm has something to say about your last decade and nothing at all to say about this one.

You have been reading a verse aimed at the good years as though it were aimed at this one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who addressed it that way. Psalm 62:10 speaks to increase rather than to loss, and the direction it is aimed is the whole of what it means.

Now look at what it does not say, because this is where the damage has been coming from.

It does not say riches are a reward. It does not say a decrease is a correction. It does not draw any line at all between how a person lived and what arrived in their hands, in either direction.

You have been told nothing about why this year is thin, and it is written only that the heart is not to be set on increase rather than that decrease means anything. The Spirit of God is the one who left that connection out of the verse, and He left it out because it is not there.

And that silence is the mercy in it.

If a good decade were wages, a thin year would be a deduction, and the arithmetic would work and it would be terrible. But the psalm refuses to open that ledger at all, and the refusal is deliberate.

You are not being paid and you are not being fined, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that ledger closed. Scripture cautions only about where the heart rests rather than about what the hands hold, and He keeps it closed on purpose.

This is not a lesson

Now let me say the thing plainly, because somebody may well say the opposite to you before December is over.

This year is not a lesson. Nobody is teaching you anything through it. There is no message inside it waiting to be decoded and no attitude that needed correcting.

Years are not curricula. Some of them are thin and some are not and the reasons are usually visible and ordinary and have names like work and health and cost and circumstance.

You have not been enrolled in anything, and it is written that the instruction concerns the heart in a season of increase rather than the meaning of a season of less. The Spirit of God is the one who refuses to turn a hard year into a syllabus, and He refuses it firmly.

And if somebody does say it to you, gently or otherwise, you do not have to receive it.

You can nod and let it go past. It is usually said by people who cannot bear a thing to be meaningless and are trying to help by giving it a shape. It is kindly meant and it is not true and you are not obliged to carry it home.

You are allowed to put down a sentence that somebody handed you kindly, and the written word never once assigns a meaning to a loss. The Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman set down a well meant thing without resentment toward the person who said it.

And here is what the last ten years actually were.

Ten years of giving generously and enjoying it. Real, good, done, banked in the lives of the people who received it. None of that is retroactively canceled by what happened to this one, and none of it has to be reinterpreted now.

You have a decade behind you that this year cannot reach, and it is written only that the heart is not to fasten onto increase rather than that increase was ever a verdict. The Spirit of God is the one who protects a good decade from a bad twelve months, and He is protecting yours right now.

What a first thin year actually costs

So let me name the real difficulty, because it is not the money and it is not the meaning.

It is the lack of practice.

A woman who has had four thin years knows things. She knows the giving still works. She knows nobody says anything. She knows the four seconds at the door and that they end. She has a body of experience that tells her the year is survivable, because she has survived one.

You have none of that. Every part of this is a first, and firsts are always worse than they turn out to be.

You are short of practice rather than short of anything else, and the Holy Spirit is the one who supplies what a woman does not yet know by experience. His word says nothing whatever about a thin year being a failure of the person in it, and He supplies it by walking her through the first one.

And here is what will actually happen, said carefully and without promising you anything about the year itself.

You will give something small. Somebody will take it and say thank you. The afternoon will carry on. Nobody will say anything and nothing will change in how anybody treats you.

And afterward there will be a small, quiet piece of knowledge in you that was not there before, and it is the piece every practiced person has.

You have practice coming to you, and it is written that the caution is against fastening the heart onto increase rather than against ever going without it. The Spirit of God is the one who builds that knowledge into a person, and He builds it the only way it can be built.

And in the meantime, refuse the question.

When the sentence comes back about what was wrong with the last ten years, do not argue with it and do not answer it. It is not a question. It is a mood wearing a question's clothes.

You are not required to produce an explanation of your own year, and Scripture assigns no meaning to a decrease anywhere in it. The Holy Spirit is the one who guards a woman from an interrogation that nobody is actually conducting.