Two Different Women In One Week

There are two of her and she has known this for years.

The first one turns up when the week has gone well. She is warm. She rings people. She notices things about them and remembers to ask. She is generous about other people's work and she means it. She cooks properly. She is, and she would say this herself, quite a good person to be around.

The second one turns up when the week has not gone well.

That one is not cruel. She is not unpleasant to anybody. She is simply absent: shorter, quieter, elsewhere, running an assessment in the background of every conversation. She cancels things. She is fine, she says, and she is fine, and she is nowhere.

Same woman. Same house. The variable is the work.

She has noticed the pattern for a long time and has never been able to do anything with it, because noticing a thing does not switch it off. And what unsettles her most is not the second woman. It is that she cannot find anybody underneath the two of them.

If you asked her who she is when the week is neither good nor bad, she would not have an answer. There does not seem to be a baseline. There is only up or down, running off a variable she does not control, and she is thirty four and has been on that switch since she was about twenty.

You may know both of those women, or both of those men. The version of you that a good week produces, and the version a bad one produces, and no third person underneath who stays.

What was said before the week started

Here is one line, and the thing to watch is the tense of it.

The LORD hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.Jeremiah 31:3

I have loved thee with an everlasting love.

Everlasting runs in both directions. It does not only mean it will not stop. It means it did not start. There was no point at which God assessed and then decided. The love was already in place before there was a week to have, good or bad.

And notice who He is saying it to. This is spoken to a people in the middle of an unambiguously terrible stretch of their own history. It is not said to them on a good week. It is said into the worst one.

You are loved with something that was in place before this week began and does not move with it. Jeremiah 31:3 puts the love before the drawing and calls it everlasting in both directions, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a floor under a woman who cannot find one.

Now I want to say something clearly, because it would be easy to hear the wrong thing.

I am not telling you to stop caring how the week goes. You are good at what you do and caring is part of how you got there, and I am not going to hand you a message that treats your standards as a fault. Nothing here is asking you to want less.

The problem is not that you care. It is that there is nothing under the caring, so the caring has to hold your whole weight, and no output can do that for anybody.

You have a constant, and it was there in both weeks and in every week before them. The written word says I have loved thee with an everlasting love, and the Holy Spirit is not one of the two women, He is the One underneath both of them.

Here is the honest half. You are still going to have both kinds of week, and the second woman will still turn up, and I am not promising you a personality that stops moving. That is not what is on offer and it would not be very human.

What is on offer is a third thing under the two, that does not rise on Friday and does not fall on Tuesday, and that has been there the entire time you were looking for it.

And there is a part only you can do, and it is deliberately small, because you have tried large things and they did not hold. You name the week honestly, and then you name one thing that was true in both kinds. Out loud. Two sentences.