Somewhere in most homes there is a calendar that has run out of pages. It hangs on a nail by the fridge or behind the kitchen door, the free one from the hardware store or the pharmacy, with a picture of a beach nobody in the house has visited. By the last week of December it is covered in biro: the date the water bill was paid, the Saturday the plumber promised to come, a circle around the day the loan officer said she would call back.
Before it comes down, it is worth reading. Not to punish yourself with it, but because it tells the truth about the year in a way memory does not.
Some of what is written there went well. The back step was finally fixed. The last payment on the fridge went through. A child who coughed through the rainy season is well now. And some of it did not go well at all. The plan to finish the upstairs room is still a plan. The money meant for the roof went to a funeral, or to a car that broke down in the same week the school fees were due. There may be a date circled that you would rather not look at: the day a sale fell through, or a relative left the house angry.
What the calendar cannot see
The words from Jeremiah that so many families pin up at New Year were written into exactly that kind of mixed season. “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the LORD, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future’” (Jeremiah 29:11). We put it on birthday cards, but its first hearers received it far from home, in circumstances they had not chosen, and were told to expect a long wait before things changed.
That matters when we sit down with our own year. God’s promise was not that every plan the people had made would come off. It was that He had plans of His own, and that those plans were good. Those are different things. The first puts our list at the centre. The second puts Him there.
Proverbs says it plainly: “A man’s heart plans his way, but the LORD directs his steps” (Proverbs 16:9). Planning is not the problem. A household that never plans is usually a household in trouble, forever caught out by the light bill and the land tax. The trouble starts when our plans become the only measure of whether God has been good to us. The upstairs room did not get finished, so the year was a failure, so God must have been absent. The calendar says one thing; the Lord may be saying something else.
Reading the year again, slowly
Try this before the calendar goes in the bin. Sit at the table with a cup of tea and go through it month by month, perhaps with your spouse or an older child. For each month ask two questions. What happened in this house? And where, looking back, can we see that we were carried?
Some answers will be plain. The storm passed to the north. The job came through in August. Others take longer to notice. The week the savings went on the funeral may also have been the week a family that had not spoken for years stood together in the same yard. The sale that fell through might have spared you a house on the wrong side of a gully. It is not always given to us to know. But it is often given to us to see more than we saw at the time.
Lamentations was written among the ruins of a city, by someone with every reason to call the year a disaster. In the middle of it comes this: “Through the LORD’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:22-23). The writer does not pretend the walls are still standing. He simply notices that he is, and that the mercy which kept him on his feet arrived fresh each day, like morning light through the louvres.
Carrying the unfinished things into January
Some pages will point forward. The roof still needs doing. The title still needs sorting. The conversation with your brother about the family land is still waiting. It is tempting to copy all of it onto the new calendar in a rush, as if the year is already behind before it has begun.
Instead, copy it over prayerfully and honestly. Which of these things is ours to do this year? Which needs someone else: a surveyor, an attorney, a better month for money? Which, if we are truthful, is really about keeping up with the neighbours and can be allowed to wait? A plan held loosely in the hands of a good God is lighter to carry than a plan clutched as proof that we are doing well.
The God who came into the world quietly, as a baby laid in a borrowed manger, tends to work quietly in our houses too. He is not only in the finished room and the cleared loan. He is in the patience it took to wait for them, and in the people who sat with you while you did.
For reflection
- Looking back over this year’s calendar, where can you see that your household was carried, even in a month you would rather forget?
- Which of next year’s plans are you holding as a gift, and which are you holding as a measure of your worth?
A prayer
Lord, thank you for this house and for this year, the pages we are glad of and the ones we would rather tear out. Thank you that your mercies met us every morning. As we make plans for the months ahead, teach us to hold them in open hands, and to trust that your plans for us are good. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
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