I Only Ever Tell The First Half

She has told it so many times it has grooves in it.

You will know the sort. Every family has one and every person has one, and hers is about the year everything went at once, and she tells it well, because she has had a decade of practice and because it is genuinely a good story if you take the human misery out of it, which she has learned to do by leaving certain bits at the edges.

She told it again last Tuesday, at the bus shelter, to a woman she has known for years and had not seen for a while.

Twelve minutes, roughly. She does the bit about the letter and the bit about the car and the bit about her sister on the phone that always gets a laugh, and then she does the ending, which is the ending she always does.

And the ending she always does is: and that was that year.

That is it. That is where she stops. She does the pause, and the other person says something like, oh, love, or, I never knew any of that, and then they talk about something else.

And standing there on Tuesday she heard herself get to that line and something went sideways in her, because it occurred to her, for the first time in ten years, that it is not the ending.

The year ended. Things happened afterwards. Some of them are the reason she was standing at that bus stop at all, in that village, on the way to a thing she was actually looking forward to.

She has never told a single person any of that. Not once. Ten years of the first half.

And you know that exactly, because there is a story you tell about your own life that stops in the same place every time.

Nobody ever hears the end

Let us settle what governs this whole page. Nothing on it is being asked of you, there is no appeal at the bottom, and nobody here is going to finish the story for you.

You are looking at an invitation, and the One being tested inside it is God. Follow the verb in the famous sentence and it lands on Him. He is under examination. He is the one who offered to be found out. It is written, put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts (Malachi 3:10), and the Holy Spirit is the One who lets a reader hear that verb land where it actually lands.

Here it is, in its own room:

Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.Malachi 3:10

Said to a nation, in one decade, about one building, where the store room had emptied and the families who worked there had gone home hungry. It is a sentence about people eating, and it was never a lever.

And here is what belongs on this page.

God had already been faithful to those people for centuries before He ever invited them to test Him, and He was faithful to you in the ten years after the year you keep telling. That invitation comes at the end of a very long book, spoken to people whose whole story is a record of what He had already done. The test was never the start. It was an invitation to notice. It is the Holy Spirit, and not this page, who takes that and stands it in a bus shelter on a Tuesday.

Now the stopping, and it needs the truth rather than a comment about being negative.

It is not ingratitude, and it is not self pity, and if anybody has ever accused you of either of those about that story they were wrong and it was unkind.

Here is what actually happens with a story like that. The hard part has a shape. It has a beginning and a middle and a terrible bit and a line at the end that lands. The afterwards has no shape at all. It is slow and untidy and made of ordinary weeks, and nothing in it makes a good twelve minutes at a bus stop, so it never gets included, and after ten years of not including it you can genuinely forget it is there.

Forgetting the second half is the ordinary condition of a person, and God has never once been surprised by it. It is written, bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits (Psalm 103:2), and nobody warns you about forgetting the thing that has grooves in it. The forgettable half is always the good one, because the good one arrives slowly.

And here is the passage for a woman who always stops in the same place.

He asked them. When I sent you out with no purse, He said, did you lack anything? And they said, nothing (Luke 22:35).

The whole answer was in the part they had never gone over. Nobody had ever asked them how it ended, and He did, and it came back in one word.

You are not being asked to be more positive, you are being asked to keep going for another two minutes, and those are two entirely different things. It is written that you shall remember the whole way the Lord your God has led you (Deuteronomy 8:2). The whole way. Not the difficult stretch. The whole of it, including the part with no shape in it. His Spirit is what makes that a walk to the end of the road rather than an instruction to cheer up.

Now the guardrails, because they are why this page hands you less than you might want.

Nobody here is going to write your second half. If this article told you what happened afterwards it would be wrong, and it would be somebody else's ending on your story.

And nobody is going to turn it into a pattern. What you find will not predict what the next hard year does, it is not a system, and it does not add up to a rule about how things go. It is three things that happened after. That is enough.

God proved Himself to you in the second half long before anybody suggested testing Him, and the finding out is looking rather than earning. It is written that He is the same yesterday and today and forever (Hebrews 13:8), so the ten years since are not a different arrangement from the year itself. Same Person, both halves.