I Am Carrying Next Year And It Is Tuesday

You had scrolled forward to March before you noticed you were doing it.

It is a Tuesday in September. You opened the file to check one thing about this month, and you checked it, and then your hand kept going, and you were looking at a row for a month that has not happened yet, doing arithmetic about a situation that does not exist.

And the number in March was bad. So you sat with that for a while, on a Tuesday.

You do this most days now.

That is the shape of the last while: you are not living in September. You are living in the whole of the next twelve months at once, all of it present in your chest simultaneously, and it is far too much to hold and it is not even real yet.

Because March depends on things nobody knows. Whether the hours change. What happens with the thing at his work. Whether the car holds together. And you have had to guess at every one of those to fill the row in, and then you have carried the answer as though it were information.

It is not information. It is a guess you made in September, and you have been frightened of it for two weeks.

This is the last article on this site, and I want to say at the start what will not be in it.

There is no promise here.

I am not going to tell you that God will provide, or that it will work out, or that March will be better than the row says. I do not know what happens in March, and anybody who tells you they do is either guessing like you or selling something.

I am also not going to tell you that money follows faith, or that a household that believes correctly ends up comfortable. That is a lie that has been sold to people in exactly your position and it has hurt a great many of them, and it will not appear anywhere on this site.

What I have is smaller than a promise and it is more useful today, on a Tuesday, in September.

Feed me with food convenient for me

There is a prayer near the end of Proverbs, and it is unusual in scripture because of what it declines to ask for.

Remove far from me vanity and lies: give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me. (Proverbs 30:8, King James Version)

Feed me with food convenient for me.

Convenient there does not mean easy. It means suitable, fitting, the amount appropriate to the need. He is asking for what is enough, and specifically not for more.

Give me neither poverty nor riches. That is a man refusing, in prayer, to ask for abundance. Not because abundance is wicked, but because he knows what it does to him, and he says so in the next verse: full, he might forget God; poor, he might steal and disgrace the name.

So there is a prayer in scripture that asks for enough, deliberately, and it is treated as wisdom rather than as a failure of ambition.

That alone is worth having if you have ever been in a room where faith was measured by how much you expected to receive.

But here is the part I want you to take from it today, and it is about the timescale.

Feed me. That is present tense and it is ongoing. It is not: settle my finances. It is not: put me in a position where I no longer have to ask. It is a request about being fed, which is a thing that happens repeatedly, meal after meal, and the prayer assumes it will be prayed again.

There is nothing in it about March.

The man praying it is not asking for visibility over the year ahead. He is asking for what is fitting, now, and he is doing it as somebody who expects to ask again tomorrow, and that is not a lesser way to live. It is what the wisest prayer about money in scripture actually looks like.

There is a prayer in the written word that asks for enough and nothing beyond it, and it has never once asked for a view of the year. Proverbs 30:8 says feed me with food convenient for me and stays in the present tense, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody looking at a row for a month that has not happened.

You are carrying a guess

Here is the practical half, and it is about what is actually in your chest.

You have twelve months in you at once, and eleven of them are made up.

This month is real. You know these numbers. They are hard and they are known, and you can act on them, and you have been acting on them competently all year.

The other eleven are constructed. Every one of those rows contains assumptions you had to invent in order to fill it in: that the hours stay, that nothing else breaks, that the thing at his work goes the way it looks like going. You made those guesses in an afternoon and then the spreadsheet gave them back to you in a column, in a font, looking exactly like the real numbers next to them.

That is the trick. A guess written in a cell looks identical to a fact written in a cell, and your body cannot tell them apart, and so you are having a physical stress response to March on a Tuesday in September.

And here is the cost of carrying it, which is not abstract.

The energy you spend on March is spent. It does not accumulate somewhere useful. Nothing you feel today makes March go better, and there is no action available to you today that comes out of that row, because everything in it depends on facts that do not exist yet.

Meanwhile today is happening and you are not in it.

And I want to be careful, because I am not telling you to stop planning. Planning is what a competent person does and you are competent. Open the file, look ahead, make the decisions that can be made now, and then close it.

The difference between planning and carrying is that planning ends.

Eleven of those twelve months are a guess you made in an afternoon, and a guess in a spreadsheet has never once been information. The written word asks for what is fitting today and does not ask to see the year, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody having a Tuesday about a March that does not exist.

Name one thing you have, before you look

So here is the last assignment on this site, and it goes before everything else in the day.

Name one thing you have today, out loud, before you look at anything ahead.

Before the file. Before the account. Before you check anything.

Out loud, say one thing that is actually here. There is food in the house today. The rent is paid this month. Everybody is well. There is fuel in the car. I have work tomorrow. Say the true one, whichever it is.

One thing. Not a list, and not an attempt to feel grateful.

And I want to separate this from the thing it resembles, because they are not the same and the difference matters.

This is not counting your blessings. It is not an exercise in feeling better about your situation, and it does not require you to feel anything at all. If you say it flatly, in a kitchen, with no warmth whatsoever, it has worked.

It is an accuracy exercise.

At the moment your first act of the day is to consult a document about a month that does not exist, and that sets the terms for everything after it. Naming one real present thing first puts a true fact in front of you before a constructed one, and it establishes the order: this is what is, and that is what might be.

Then go and look at the file if you need to. This is not instead of planning. It is before it.

And when you catch yourself in March at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday, and you will, you do not have to fight your way out. Say the one thing again, out loud, wherever you are. It takes three seconds and it is a return rather than a struggle.

And that is the last word from this site: you are allowed to live in the day you are actually in. Not because the year is settled. Because today is where you are, and it is the only place anything can be done.

You are able to put one true present thing in front of a constructed future one, and today has never once required you to see how the year ends. Proverbs 30:8 asks for the food that is fitting now and asks again tomorrow, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody saying one plain sentence in a kitchen before anything else.