He Is Able To Keep You From Falling

She could describe it to you in order, and the fact that she could is the whole problem.

First the mornings go. Not dramatically; she will just start doing them at odd times, and then some days not at all, and she will tell herself she is in a busy stretch.

Then she will stop reading anything except what she needs for the Tuesday group, and she will keep leading it, and that is the part that always troubles her most when she runs it through, because she has watched herself do that before and she knows she is good enough to carry it on nothing.

Then she will start finding reasons about Sundays. Never a decision. A run of reasons.

Then about four months in there will be an evening where she realizes she has not said anything to God directly in weeks.

She is forty-four. She has been through two of these. And what she is doing now, in what is by any measure a perfectly good season, is running the sequence, regularly, the way you rehearse a fire drill.

She would call it realism. She would say she is not naive about herself. And she has never once noticed that the plan has no one in it but her.

Who is described as able

Jude ends his letter with a sentence about capability, and the whole thing turns on who the capable party is.

Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy.Jude 1:24

Unto him that is able.

The capability is His and it is named as His. Jude does not say now unto you who must be careful, and he does not say unto him who is able to help you keep yourself. The keeping from falling is listed as something God is able to do, in the same breath as presenting somebody faultless, which is not a thing anybody assists with.

And look at the end of the sentence, because it goes somewhere your plan never does. With exceeding joy. The whole arc Jude describes ends in gladness, and the person being kept arrives faultless, and there is nothing in it about a woman managing a decline well.

You are the object of a keeping God is described as able to perform. That is not me being optimistic on your behalf; Jude 1:24 puts the ability in Him by name, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a letter's closing sentence and lays it beside a fire drill run in a good season.

What the rehearsal is doing

Now let me be straight about the plan, because you would call it realism and it is worth taking that seriously before setting it aside.

You are not wrong about the pattern. Two of those seasons happened and they went roughly like that, and a woman who knows herself is not a fool.

But look at who is in the script. There is a decline, and there is you, and there is you watching yourself decline, and there is nobody else in it at all. God does not appear. He is not in the sequence you rehearse, not at the beginning and not in the middle and not at four months.

Which means the thing you have been calling realism is a scenario in which the only agent is the one who cannot hold it, and you have been running that scenario in a good season until it has become the truest-feeling thing you own.

You have written a script with no one in the keeping role, and Scripture names that role and fills it. The written word gives the ability to keep from falling to God explicitly, and the Holy Spirit does not stand outside a believer's hard season taking notes.

And now the guardrail, which this site holds harder than anything. If a dry stretch comes, and it may, it will not be your failure and it will not be a verdict. There is no maintenance routine I could give you that would prevent one, and I am not going to invent one, because handing you a program would just be a fourth item for your plan.

You are not the one holding this together, and the next cold season is not a test you are going to be marked on. Scripture gives the keeping and the presenting both to Him, and the Holy Spirit has been the one carrying a woman through two of those seasons already, including the four-month stretches she thinks of as her collapse.