The Date He Will Not Circle

There is a calendar on the wall by the back door, the kind with a picture of a mountain at the top and a square for each day, and there are three months of squares in front of him and he has not put a circle in any of them.

The office has called three times. He knows what the messages say without listening to them, and he has listened to none of them, which he is aware is a thing that would sound strange to anybody who has not done it.

He is sixty-one. It is not an emergency. That is the difficulty. If it were an emergency he would be in a bed already and somebody else would be deciding. Instead there are three dates on offer, and a recovery time, and a set of risks that were explained clearly by a person who did not hurry, and it is his to choose.

His wife has not pushed him. He wishes she would and he is grateful she has not, both at once.

And here is what he has not said to anybody, including her: he cannot choose a date because choosing a date makes it real. As long as the calendar has no circle in it, this is a thing that might happen. The moment there is a circle, there is a morning he has to walk toward, and everything between now and that morning becomes a countdown.

Anybody who has left a message unlistened knows this exactly. And I want to say straight away that I am not going to touch the medical decision. Not a word about which date, or whether, or what anybody should do with their own body. That belongs to him and to the people who actually know his case.

The sentence said to people with nowhere to go

Let me put a line down and remember where the people hearing it were standing.

The LORD shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace.Exodus 14:14

The sea is in front of them. An army is behind them. That is the entire situation, and it is not a metaphor: they are on a beach with no road and they are, in the most literal sense available, out of options.

And what Moses says is not a plan. He does not give them a route. He tells them who is going to do the fighting and then tells them what their part is, which is to hold their peace, and the Hebrew there is closer to be still, or be quiet, than to a stoic attitude.

You are fought for, and the fighting is not being done by your ability to face this well. That is not a soft word for a man with three unlistened voicemails. It is what is written in Exodus 14, and His Spirit is the one who takes a written line and puts it into a kitchen with a calendar on the wall. The date is a date. The fighting is God's.

And I want to be careful with that verse, because it is often used to tell people not to act, and the very next verse in the chapter is God telling Moses to get the people moving. The stillness is not passivity. It is a person not having to generate their own rescue while they do the next thing.

You have been given the next thing to do rather than the whole crossing, and the fighting was never on your list. Exodus 14:15 has them moving one verse later, and it is the Spirit who makes an old story land in a man at a kitchen counter.

Not circling it is not cowardice

Now the part this category exists for.

He is not a coward. A man who has run a household for forty years and taken hard news without flinching is not suddenly a weak man because he has not circled a square on a calendar. What is happening is much more precise than fear.

He has understood, correctly, that a circle turns a possibility into a countdown, and he is not wrong about that. It does. And nobody has acknowledged it, because everybody around him is being encouraging, and encouragement is not the same as being understood.

I am also not going to push him toward any of it, and I want that said plainly. I do not know his heart, his lungs, his risks or his life. What I will do is separate two things that have got welded together, because I think that welding is the whole weight.

The date is his to choose. The morning is not his to carry.

Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you.1 Peter 5:7

He has been carrying a morning that has not happened yet, and it is the heaviest thing in that kitchen, and it was never assigned to him.

You were never given the job of carrying a day that has not arrived, and you have been carrying it since the first phone call. 1 Peter 5:7 is the text this sits on, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man put down a weight that was not his.

You are steady right now, in this kitchen, with three months of empty squares in front of you. It is written that the Lord fights and the person holds their peace, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that true in a man who has not listened to three messages.

If any of this ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor plainly what has actually been going on with the phone. Dread about a medical decision is a real and treatable thing and it is not a character issue, and being fought for by God has never been a reason to face it without a person in the room.