The Fifth Dry Winter

Six forty in the morning on Sutter Hollow Road, nineteen degrees, and Marlene Doss is on the porch step in a quilted coat with a mug she is holding more for her hands than for her mouth.

She has come out to this step at this hour for twenty two years. The frost is white on the top rail and on the whole field down to the creek, and the sun is not over the ridge yet but the sky above it has gone that thin January orange that means it is coming.

She is fifty eight. Her Bible is on the arm of the chair behind her with a rubber band around it because the back cover came off in 2016.

It used to be that this was the hour. Not every day, she was never one for pretending, but often enough that she planned her life around it. She would come out with the coffee and read a little and start talking to the Lord about the day, and something would rise in her, a warmth in the chest that was not the coffee, and she would go in and start the day carrying it.

She cannot tell you the last morning that happened. She has thought about it and she cannot pin it down, which somehow makes it worse than a date would.

She knows the general neighborhood of when it stopped. Her mother came to live with them in the spring of 2018 and got worse through that fall and worse again after Christmas, and Marlene did eighteen months of lifting and washing and two in the morning and the smell of the room, and they buried her in October of 2019. Marlene stood at that graveside and felt about as much as she feels now, which is not nothing exactly. It is more like a radio playing in another house.

So this is the fifth winter.

She still comes out. She still reads, and the words are all familiar, and it is like reading a menu in a language she used to speak. She still says things to God, out loud sometimes, and it goes about as far as the rail.

She has never once said any of this to another living soul, because what would you even call it. Nobody is going to ask her about it. She teaches the two year olds on Sunday. She takes food when somebody dies. She is, by any measure anyone else can see, the same woman.

But she has a thought that has been sitting in her for a couple of years now and it has gotten more comfortable in there than she would like, and the thought is this: whatever used to be in me burned out around 2019, and I have been running on the fumes of it ever since, and one of these winters the fumes are going to be gone too.

The sun comes over the ridge and hits the frost on the rail and the whole thing lights up for about ninety seconds the way it does.

Marlene watches it. Then she goes in, because the dog wants out and the day is a day.

The line was written in the ashes

There is a sentence that ends up on coffee mugs and calendars, and almost nobody who loves it knows where it was written or by whom or what he was sitting in when he wrote it.

They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:23

Lamentations. A funeral poem over a burned city. The man writing it has watched the walls come down and the temple go up in smoke and the people carried off, and he is not being brave about it. Read what is right before that verse. He says his soul has these things still in remembrance and is humbled in him. He says he had forgotten what prosperity was. A few lines earlier he says his strength and his hope are perished.

And then he says this I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope, and out comes the line about the mercies being new every morning.

He is not reporting a feeling. He is reciting a fact against the evidence of his own chest, in the ashes, with the smoke still going.

You are held by a faithfulness that was never once measured by what you could feel at six forty in the morning. I am not saying that to talk you out of how dry it has been. Lamentations 3:23 says great is thy faithfulness, and it is written in the middle of the bleakest book anybody ever put in a Bible, on purpose, by a man with nothing left. And the Holy Spirit does not need your chest to warm up before that sentence is true. He is the one who put it in the ashes where it belongs.

Notice the word new. Not renewed once. Not restored when you get back on your feet. New every morning, which means this morning, the fifth winter, the one where the coffee is the only warm thing on the porch.

You have mercy that is new this morning, and it was new on every one of the five hundred mornings you did not feel a thing. That is written in Lamentations 3:23 and the written word does not attach a mood to it anywhere in the verse. What the Spirit adds, on a step at nineteen degrees, is that the delivery never stopped and you were never told it had.

You were never the fuel

Now here is the thought that has gotten comfortable, and I want to take it apart gently, because it did not come from nowhere and it is not stupid.

The thought is that there was a supply in you and it ran down. Which assumes you were the tank.

Go look at how the lamp in the tabernacle worked. The oil was brought in from outside, pressed olive oil, carried in by the people. The lamp did not make it, and the priest who tended the lamp did not make it either. That lamp burned continually, and every ounce of what it burned was handed to it.

You were never the fuel, and five dry winters did not turn out to be an audit of a supply you were supposed to be keeping. John 8:12 has Jesus saying He is the light of the world and giving the light of life to whoever follows Him, which puts the source outside you in writing, permanently. And the Spirit is not standing on that porch measuring your reserves. There are no reserves. There is a supply, and it is His.

Something else that needs saying. An empty season is not a failure and it is not a discipline problem, and rest is not a dimming. You spent eighteen months lifting and washing and getting up at two in the morning. Something in a person goes quiet after that, and it is not sin and it is not backsliding and God did not take a step back from you in October of 2019. He was in that room the whole time, at two in the morning, every one of those nights.

I am also not going to tell you when the warmth comes back or promise you a season. I do not know, and anybody who tells you they do is guessing. What I can hand you is what is written, and what is written is that the mercies are new this morning, which is the only morning you are actually standing in.

This is yours: a cold step, a mug going lukewarm, and a light you were never responsible for producing. Lamentations 3:23 wrote down the new, and John 8:12 wrote down the source, and both of them were settled long before your mother got sick. And the Spirit says both of them again right now, over a field of frost that is about to go gold for ninety seconds.