A Year With Two Shapes

He does the calendar in October now, on his own, at the kitchen table, with a coffee, and it takes him about two hours and he does not enjoy any of it.

It used to be his favorite thing. He is the one in that family who plans, who books, who says right, so this year we will do it like this. He likes it. He is good at it.

And somewhere in the last decade the calendar stopped being a plan and became a settlement.

Because his year has two shapes in it and they do not line up. There are the days one side of his family has kept since before anybody can remember, and there are the days the other side keeps, and some years they land near each other and most years they do not, and either way there are more days in the year than there are him.

So in October he sits down with a coffee and he decides, twelve months in advance, who is going to be quietly hurt and when.

He never puts it that way to anybody. He says, oh, we will try to do both. He has said we will try to do both every October for eleven years.

And by about the third week of doing this he noticed something worse than the arithmetic, which is that he has stopped looking forward to any of it. Every one of those days now arrives with an apology attached, either to the people he is with or to the people he is not, and a day you apologize about is not a feast, it is an appointment.

You know that October.

Maybe your year has two shapes for a different reason. Maybe it is two families, or two countries, or a table where two sets of words could be said and only one gets said. Maybe you have found yourself doing something you love while composing a message to somebody about why you were not somewhere else.

Nobody meant this. Every person on both sides of this would be appalled to know he sits down in October and works out who gets hurt. They think he is good at organizing.

Read where the day goes

Here is a passage that arrives in the middle of exactly this argument, in a congregation that was full of people from both shapes of a year, and the striking thing is what it refuses to do.

One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind. He that regardeth the day, regardeth it unto the Lord; and he that regardeth not the day, to the Lord he doth not regard it.Romans 14:5-6

It does not decide. That is the first thing, and people find it almost unbearable, and it is deliberate.

But look at what it does instead, because it is much better than a ruling.

Unto the Lord. That phrase is applied to both. The man who keeps the day keeps it unto the Lord. The man who does not keep it does not keep it unto the Lord. The same destination is given to both practices, which means the thing that matters about a day is not which shape it has but who it is addressed to.

You are keeping your year unto the Lord, and both shapes of it arrive at the same address. That is what the passage does by applying unto the Lord to both sides of the question (Romans 14:6), and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who persuades a person in their own mind, which is the only mechanism the passage gives and it is not a committee.

The apology is the thing to put down

Now here is what has actually gone wrong, and it is not the calendar.

The calendar is a real problem and it has no solution. There are more days than there is you, and no amount of October is going to fix that, and this page is not going to pretend a system exists.

What can be put down is the apology.

Because an apology says a wrong has been done. And when you sit at a table on one of those days with an apology running underneath it, you are telling yourself, all evening, that being there is a small betrayal of somewhere else. Do that for eleven years and no day in your year is a feast any more.

You have not wronged anybody by being in one place at one time, and a body in one chair is not an offense. Scripture says let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind (Romans 14:5), and the passage puts that persuading in each person's own conscience before the Lord, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that work in a person, which is why a man cannot owe his whole family the impossible.

And nothing here tells you which days to keep. Not one word of it. You are not being handed a calendar by anybody on this page, and no practice is being prescribed or discouraged. The word says who art thou that judgest another man's servant? to his own master he standeth or falleth (Romans 14:4), and His Spirit is the one who holds a person up in whatever they have settled, which is stated in that same verse: yea, he shall be holden up.