The Winter I Got Up Every Morning

She got up every single day of that winter, and she could not tell you what one of those mornings looked like.

Not one. Not the alarm, not the walk to the bus, not the coffee she must have made because there were mugs in the sink. Her sister died on the eighth of November and the next thing she can properly see is a Tuesday in March when the light came into the kitchen at a different angle and she noticed it, and thought, oh, and stood there for a while.

Between those two points there are about a hundred and twenty mornings that happened to somebody, and the somebody was her, and she has no idea.

People keep saying it. You have been so strong. Your parents said it at Easter. A woman at work said it in the elevator. Everybody means it warmly and everybody is describing a person she has never met.

And here is the part she has told nobody. She does not want the credit, but she is frightened of what happens if the credit is not hers. Because if she did not do it, then she does not know what did, and if she does not know what did, she cannot go and get more of it when the anniversary comes.

You know this shape. Some winter, some hundred and twenty mornings, and a room full of people admiring a version of you that was not on duty at the time.

Count the winter honestly before anybody calls it strong

Her parents did not count it, so we will.

It cost her a hundred and twenty mornings she will never have as memory. It cost her the first year of a job she had been thrilled about in October. It cost her the friendships that could not stay near that much silence.

And it cost her something nobody at Easter would have guessed: it took her sister twice. Once in November, and then again in the fog, because she cannot remember grieving her, which means the winter took the mourning too.

You have been carrying a loss with a hole in the middle of it, and God has never once required you to remember it properly to have done it properly. Psalm 56:8 says your wanderings are told and your tears are in His bottle, and it is His Spirit who takes that off a page and puts it in a kitchen in March. Nothing that happened in the fog went unrecorded on His side.

New every morning, and the mornings were not hers

There is one line built for a woman with a hundred and twenty missing mornings.

It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is your faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22 and 23

Read what is new every morning. Not her resolve. Not her strength. His compassions. And read the reason given for the not being consumed, because it is not that she held on. It is His mercies, plural, arriving daily, in a book written by a man in the middle of a national catastrophe who was not feeling any of it either, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that a fact about a specific winter rather than a sentence for a greeting card.

You were met by new mercy on every one of those mornings, and the mercy did not wait for you to be awake to it. That is not a comfort I have arranged for a hard November. The written word puts the newness on His side and the not being consumed as the result, and the Spirit is the one who did the meeting while a girl made coffee she cannot remember making. Her parents said strong. Lamentations never once says strong about the person.

And this must be said plainly. Your sister's death is not a display. It was not arranged so that a family could learn something from watching you keep going. God did not take her in November to teach anybody anything about you. She was not a lesson and you are not an exhibit.

Two things a woman with a fog has to hear

The first is that God still meets people who are not tracking it. Not met, poetically, in an older world. Meets, present tense, daily, at six in the morning in the dark.

The second is that the meeting was not a response to how she was handling it. She was not handling it. That is the entire point of the fog, and the mercies were new anyway.

You were kept through the whole winter, and being kept was never a thing you earned by coping well. Psalm 121:3 says He who keeps you does not slumber, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes does not slumber a fact about a hundred and twenty specific nights rather than a general truth about God.

One plain sentence before we go on. If the fog is thickening again, or if there are hours where carrying on is genuinely a question, please tell one real human being today, and if it is urgent, call your doctor or a crisis line before anybody else. That is not the mercy failing. That is the mercy arriving with a face and a phone number, and reaching for it is obedience rather than collapse.