Everlasting Does Not Mean It Peaked

She hears herself do it in a car with two women she has known for twenty years, on the way back from a thing neither of them enjoyed.

Somebody asks her a question about the early days, and she answers, and she is good at this, and she notices halfway through that she is using the past perfect the whole way. It had been. We had seen. There had been a season where.

She is talking about her own life with God the way you talk about a novel you read in your thirties and loved and have not opened since.

She is fifty-one. She is not in crisis. She would like that understood before anything else, because when she has tried to say a version of this out loud people have reached for her hand and got worried and she has had to spend the rest of the conversation reassuring them.

She goes. She serves. She has led a group on a Wednesday for eleven years and those women would go through a wall for her and she for them.

But she has, at some point she cannot date, quietly closed the book. Not thrown it out. Closed it, and put it on the shelf where the good ones go, and started referring to it in a fond past tense.

And the sentence underneath, the one she has never said in a car or anywhere else, is: the best chapter has been read.

Take the word in both directions

Jeremiah writes a sentence where God says how long He has been loving, and the word He uses will not let you keep a peak in it.

Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.Jeremiah 31:3

Everlasting. We usually take that one direction, forward. It will not stop. Fine.

But it runs backward too, and that is the direction you need tonight. It had no beginning either. It did not start when you first felt it and it did not intensify when you were most responsive, because a love with no beginning cannot have had a warming-up period and cannot have had a best year.

Think about what that does to a peak. To have a high point, a thing has to have a shape: a rise, a summit, a fall. Everlasting has no shape of that kind. There is no ascent behind you, so there is no descent you are currently on.

You have been placing a summit inside something that has no gradient at all. That is not me pressing a word harder than it will go; everlasting is exactly what Jeremiah 31:3 says about it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and lays it over a woman using the past perfect in a car.

What you actually closed

Now let me be precise about what got closed, because it matters and I do not think it is what you think.

You did not close your life with God. Look at the evidence rather than at the feeling. Eleven years of Wednesdays. Women who would go through a wall for you. That is not a shelved book; that is somebody still very much in it.

What you closed was the narrative. You had a way of telling your own faith that had a shape to it, a beginning and a middle and a high point, and at some stage the story stopped supplying new chapters that fitted, and rather than question the shape you concluded the book was over.

You are still in something you have stopped narrating, and the narration is not the thing. The written word puts God's love before and beneath any account a person gives of it, and the Holy Spirit has been in eleven years of Wednesdays that never made it into the story.

And I want to say something about the fond past tense, because it is doing more damage than the sadness is. A fond past tense is comfortable. It has no ache in it. It lets you speak about God warmly at any dinner table without ever being exposed, and it protects you from the far more dangerous thing, which is expecting something on a Thursday.

Dry seasons are not sin and closing a narrative is not apostasy, and nobody is going to come after you for either. But comfort is worth naming, because a thing that hurts gets dealt with and a thing that is merely comfortable can last thirty years.

You are loved by something that has never had a best year to fall from, and you were never on the far side of anything. Scripture calls it everlasting and puts no shape in it at all, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that true in a woman who has been speaking about it in the past perfect.