He Loved You at Your Coldest Already

She keeps a spreadsheet, though she would never call it that, and it has one column and the column is the year.

Two thousand and nine was a good year. She could tell you why. There was a season of about fourteen months where she got up at half five and it was not a discipline, it was the best part of the day, and she led a group and two people came to faith and she has told that story since without ever making it sound like the boast it partly is.

Two thousand and seventeen was terrible, and she is at peace with that now, mostly.

And this year, which is not terrible and is not good, has been what she would call flat.

The trouble is what she does with the ledger, and it is so instinctive that she has never once inspected it. She reads a warm year as a year in which something was earned. Not salvation. She would be quick on that; she is not confused about grace as a doctrine. But affection. Closeness. The sense of God being pleased with her, specifically, as distinct from being committed to her generally.

So a flat year reads as a year with nothing in the account. Not a debt. Just nothing coming in.

And she has begun, in an entirely unexamined way, to feel that she is running down a balance she built up in 2009 and has not topped up since.

The state you were in when He started

Paul writes a sentence in Ephesians that puts a date and a condition on when God's love went into operation, and the condition is the part that ends the ledger.

But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ.Ephesians 2:4-5

Even when we were dead.

Not lukewarm. Not distracted. Not going through a flat patch. Dead, which is the coldest condition available in the whole of language, and there is no colder year you could have that would come anywhere near it.

So run your ledger against that. Whatever this year is, it is warmer than dead. Whatever 2017 was, it was warmer than dead. And He loved at dead. That is the documented starting point.

You were loved at a temperature you will never go back down to, and every year since has been an improvement on the conditions He began in. That is not me finding an angle; it is the exact state Ephesians 2:5 names, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an apostle's clause and lays it over a woman's private accounting of her own years.

Wages and gifts do not mix

Now let me name what the ledger actually is, because you would spot it instantly in somebody else.

You have taken the one thing Scripture insists is a gift and started receiving it as a wage. Not deliberately. Nobody decides to do this. It happens because a warm season feels like something you did, and a flat one feels like something you failed to do, and a person naturally reads a pattern like that as cause and effect.

But a wage and a gift cannot occupy the same space. The moment affection becomes something earned in good years, every ordinary year becomes a shortfall, and you spend your life either paying in or drawing down.

You have been treating a gift as an income, and there is no account anywhere with your balance in it. The written word says it was mercy and great love toward the dead rather than a return on anybody's condition, and the Holy Spirit is not an auditor of a woman's better and worse years.

And I want to say something about 2009 as well, because there is a quieter injury in this. You have been carrying that fourteen months as capital. As the thing you did once that keeps you solvent. It was not capital. It was a season God gave you, and He gave it the same way He gives everything, and turning it into savings has meant you have never simply enjoyed it.

You are not running down a balance, and the balance does not exist to be run down. Scripture puts the whole of it on His mercy rather than on a person's output, and the Holy Spirit has been in the flat year exactly as much as in the fourteen months.