Counting Winter From July

It starts in the middle of July, most years, and it always starts on a good day.

That is the strange part. It is not a bad week that sets it off. It is a run of good ones. Three weeks of steady work and decent weather and money coming in the way it is supposed to, and somewhere in the middle of that his head does the sum, and the sum is about February.

How many weeks left. What the rate has been. What that comes to by the end of October, and what that has to cover through to the middle of March, and whether it will.

By the time he has finished, he is not in July. He is standing in February in his own head, on a wet morning, in a bad month, and he has not moved from the porch step.

His wife came out last summer with two glasses of lemonade and his youngest was doing something on the grass that was genuinely funny, and she looked at him and said, where are you.

He said, here. And she waited a second and then went back in.

He has been doing this for six years. Six summers. And the maths is not wrong, that is what he would tell you if you pushed him. It is prudent. A man in seasonal work who does not think about February is a fool, and there is a version of that which is entirely true.

But six summers is six summers, and he could not tell you one thing about any of them.

You know that porch step. Yours might be a term time job, or a contract that ends in the spring, or a business that has a quiet quarter you can see coming from a long way off. And you would call it planning, and part of it is. But there is a part that is not planning, because planning takes twenty minutes and then finishes, and this does not finish.

Sit down on the step. The light is good and it will not be this light for long. There is a story about a barrel and a jar in a famine, and it is not the story people think it is.

There is no code, and there is a barrel that did not waste

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over the door of this place promises a secret and I am not going to sit on a step with a working man and hint at one.

There is no code. There is nothing in Scripture that fills a barrel by a formula, and nothing here is a technique. And I will say the second thing straight out, because it matters: if your winter is genuinely not covered, if the sum comes out short, this article does not tell you to relax about it. That would be a stupid and cruel thing to say to a man with a family. This is for the man whose summer is met and who is not in it.

Here is the story. A widow in a famine, down to a handful of meal and a little oil, gathering sticks to make a last meal for her and her son before they die. That is not poetic, that is what the text says she was doing. And a prophet arrives and asks her for bread first.

And the barrel of meal wasted not, neither did the cruse of oil fail, according to the word of the LORD, which he spake by Elijah.1 Kings 17:16

Now here is the part that everybody skips and that is the whole thing for a man like you. That barrel never became a full barrel.

Read it again. It did not waste. It did not fail. There is no verse where she looks in and finds it heaped up and can stop thinking about it. She went to that barrel every single day of a multi year famine and there was enough in it for that day, and then she went again the next day, and it was the same.

She never once got the thing you want, which is a season's worth in hand so the counting can stop. What she got was a barrel that did not fail, one day at a time, for years.

You are not going to be given February in July, and the not wasting was always a daily event rather than a stockpile. That is not a soft idea I am arranging on a porch. It is written in 1 Kings 17, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an old barrel in a famine and lays it beside a man standing in February on a summer evening.

You have today, and today is met. Scripture says the barrel wasted not, in a country where nothing grew, and His Spirit is the one who makes an ancient daily supply land on a body that has been six years in the wrong month.

Now let me say the hard true thing, since we are sitting.

The counting is not going to stop when the numbers are better. That is the part that keeps a man like you doing it for six years. You believe there is a figure at which the counting ends, and there is not, because the counting is not caused by the figure. It is caused by the not knowing, and there is no amount of money that abolishes not knowing.

And what it has cost is not measured in money either. Your wife came out with lemonade and asked where you were and you said here and you were not here.

You are not a bad provider for having a February in your head, and prudence was never meant to run all year. Scripture says the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, and a shepherd's whole job is the days the sheep cannot see round, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a psalm that everybody knows and makes it a hand on a man's shoulder on a step.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because six summers do not come back because a friend was decent to you on a porch. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what running the numbers again never does. So speak, out loud, on your own porch. You have the standing to speak to a season and tell it what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that yours by position rather than by season, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word further than a mown field.