A Year of Almost Turning

The park is doing what a park does on a Saturday. A five-a-side game with jumpers for goalposts. Two women running side by side with a pushchair between them. Somebody's collie carrying a stick far too large for it and refusing every offer of help.

Twenty of them are walking the outer circuit, the way they do every week, anticlockwise, because that is how it was done the first week and nobody has ever proposed otherwise. Flasks in a rucksack. A man at the front who knows the name of every tree and will tell you.

She walks near the back beside a woman who mostly talks about her greenhouse, which suits her exactly, because it asks nothing of her but the occasional yes.

Halfway round, at the bend where the path runs along the railings, the greenhouse woman says a sentence with no weight in it at all.

"I finally did the shed. Eleven months I looked at that shed. Took me twenty minutes."

She laughs. It is funny. It is a sentence about a shed.

And something in the person walking beside her goes very still and keeps walking at exactly the same speed.

She said it about a shed. You heard it about something else entirely, and you knew which thing before she reached the end of the sentence. That has never been your difficulty. You have not spent this year confused about what you need to turn from. You have spent it walking the outer circuit, passing the same place every lap, near enough each time to see it clearly, and every lap has quietly cost you something you could not have itemized at the time.

Turning is a direction, not a distance

Let me say the true thing about your year before I say anything hopeful, because hope laid over the top of an unnamed weight never reaches the person underneath it.

You have been sorry more times than anyone knows. That is the part nobody sees. From the outside a postponed turn looks like indifference, and from the inside it is the exact opposite: it is a person who has been genuinely, painfully sorry on fifty-one separate occasions and has watched the fifty-first come to nothing precisely as the fifty before it did. The tiredness you are carrying is not the tiredness of a hard heart. It is the tiredness of a soft one that has tried, and tried.

And you are not carrying a hard heart. Scripture says the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, and a broken and a contrite heart He will not despise, which puts the fifty-one sorry Saturdays on the accepted side of the ledger rather than the failed side, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that reach a person who has stopped believing their own sorrow counts.

And somewhere in the middle of the year the arithmetic quietly changed. It stopped being about the thing itself and started being about the record. Turning now would mean admitting the year, facing how long you have known, and that has become heavier than the thing you needed to turn from in the first place. So you circle, because circling asks nothing of you today.

Here is the sentence I want to put into your hands.

In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength.Isaiah 30:15

Read what it does not contain. There is no ordeal in it. No probation, no proof, no scale on which sorry is weighed to see whether it is sorry enough. Returning, and rest. Quietness, and confidence. Those are not the words of a God with His arms folded, waiting to see whether you mean it this time.

The word underneath repentance all through the prophets is the Hebrew shuv, and it means simply to turn back. Teshuvah is the turning itself, the return. Notice what that is, and what it is not. It is not a journey with a distance to be covered. It is a change of facing. A person standing with their back to the house is one movement from facing it, and the movement is the same size whether they are ten steps out of the door or ten years.

And you have a direction available to you that no amount of delay has closed. Isaiah 30:15 puts the saving in the returning and the strength in the quietness rather than in the distance traveled, and the Spirit is the one who turns that from a verse you can recite into a door you can walk through this morning.

Which means your year, the thing that feels like the main obstacle, is not the obstacle at all. Distance would need traveling. Direction only needs turning. You have been treating the delay as a sentence to be served before you are allowed to move, and it never was one.

And the pull you have felt all year, at the sink, on the stairs, on the outer circuit of a park on a Saturday morning, was never a threat standing over you. Scripture says plainly that it is the kindness of God that leads a person to repentance. Kindness. Not fright, not a raised voice, not a countdown running somewhere out of sight. If something has been drawing you toward this all year, patiently, and has never once shamed you into it, you already know Whose that is. Shame drives from behind. Kindness leads from in front, and it has been leading you.

And you are being led rather than hunted. Romans 2:4 says it is the goodness of God that leads a person to repentance, which names the hand on your year as a kindness and not a countdown, and the Spirit is the one who has been doing the leading at the sink and on the stairs the whole way round.

Look at how the story of the lost son actually goes, because the timing in it is the whole point. He rehearses a speech on the road. He gets a few words of it out. He never finishes, because his father has seen him a long way off and is already running, and the running begins while the boy is still filthy and still mid sentence. The turning was met before the explanation was made.

That is not an ancient arrangement that has since lapsed. God has not changed His manner. What He did in that story He does now, for people who did not tidy themselves up first, and He does it for you personally rather than for a better version of you who has managed a consistent fortnight. You are in Christ, and Christ is in you, and Scripture says the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwells in you, so a person in Christ never turns back toward a locked door.