The diary is a good one. Somebody gave it to her at Christmas and it has a ribbon in it and thick paper and a week across two pages, which is the layout she has always liked.
She was ill for a long time. She is not going to make that the subject of a conversation and it is not the subject here; what matters is that it lasted the better part of two years and that it took things away one at a time, quietly, and that most of them went without anybody noticing including her.
The job went. The two evening things went. The friendships did not go, exactly, they thinned, which is a different thing and is not anybody's fault.
She is well now. Mostly well; well enough.
And there is a week in front of her with nothing on it.
She sits with the diary open in the mornings. That is a real thing she does, most days, with coffee, and it is the strangest hour of her life. There is nothing stopping her writing something on Tuesday. She could ring somebody. She could put a walk down. There is no illness in the way anymore and no one is preventing her and she has time, which is the thing she wanted for two years.
She sits and looks at it and does not write.
She is forty four.
And what has begun to grow, since about June, and what she has said to precisely nobody, is a reading of that blank page that goes like this: an empty week means an empty life, and an empty life at forty four is a verdict, and the verdict is that she has been passed over.
Not by God, particularly. She would not put it in those terms. Just passed over, the way a village is passed over by a road that got built somewhere else.
You know the blank page. Yours may be a year or a diary or a Sunday afternoon. But you know what it is to look at emptiness and to read it as a judgement, and to have started doing that so gradually that you never noticed the reading being made.
Emptiness is where He was first
Let me name the pit before we open the book, because if this lands as encouragement to be busy it will make everything worse.
The pit is not the empty week. The pit is the reading. Somewhere in the last two years, without a decision, you learned to treat blankness as evidence, and now every morning a page delivers a verdict to a woman who is only just well, and the verdict is delivered before the coffee is finished.
Here is the second sentence in the Bible.
The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.Genesis 1:2
Void. That is the word. Empty. Nothing on it, nothing in it, no shape and no content and no plan.
Now read what the Bible does with that emptiness, because it is the opposite of what you have been doing with yours.
It does not treat it as a failure. It does not treat it as a verdict on anybody. It states it, and then it tells you what was over it, and what was over it was the Spirit of God, and the word for what He was doing is a brooding word. Deuteronomy 32:11 uses the same picture for an eagle spreading herself over her nest and her young.
Here I teach one thing about the Hebrew and I draw the line in the same breath, because on this ground the two do not travel apart. The word for Spirit there is ruach, which also means breath and wind, and in Hebrew it is a feminine word, so the verb beside it takes a feminine form, exactly as it would beside the word for a hand or a city. Grammar is not sex. God is neither male nor female; Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and Scripture describes Him with a father's traits and a mother's both, and the bird over the nest is one of the motherly pictures and He chose it Himself. It does not make the Spirit a woman and it does not make God a goddess. It makes the picture true.
Take that with the diary open, and know it is not my consolation, it is the second sentence of the Bible. The empty page is the exact place He is described as being, and it is not evidence against you. Genesis 1:2 puts the Spirit over a void, before anything at all, and it is the Holy Spirit who is over your week while there is nothing on it.
And then, one verse later, the thing that empties the verdict of its power.
And God said, Let there be light.Genesis 1:3
Content came into that emptiness from above it, by a word. The void did not fill itself. It was not asked to. Nowhere is the deep blamed for having been blank, and nowhere is it praised for what came afterward.
A blank week is not a small life, and it is certainly not a passed over one. I am not decorating an empty diary; I am telling you where Scripture locates the Spirit of God, and it locates Him over exactly this, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been over your mornings since June while you sat there reading a page as a sentence.
You are not required to fill it today.
You are not being asked to fill that week, and the blank in it is not a report on you. Genesis 1:2 has the Spirit of God moving over a deep that had no shape at all and was not asked to produce one first, and it is the Holy Spirit who moves over what is empty, which is the only reason an empty week is a place He can work.
That is the sentence, and I want you to notice how much it costs to accept, because a woman who is finally well feels she owes somebody a full page.
You do not. There is nobody to whom that debt is owed. Not God, who is described in the second sentence of His own book as brooding over a void without impatience. Not the people who thinned away, who were not keeping score. And not the version of yourself who was ill, who would look at this week with astonished relief and would not understand the shame at all.
You are brooded over on a blank page, right now, and the filling comes from above and not out of you. That is Genesis 1:2 and 1:3, and it is the Holy Spirit who is over an empty week, and He has never once been in a hurry about a void.
So change what the morning is for. Keep the hour. Keep the coffee and the diary and the ribbon.
Only stop reading the page as a verdict, and start reading it as the place the Spirit of God is described as hovering.
I am not going to promise you a full week by autumn, or a job, or the friendships coming back thick. I do not know. What I know is the order on the first page of the Bible, which has never once been reversed: brooding, then a word, then content. And the void did nothing, and what came of it was called good.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, sitting, with the diary open. You are in Christ, and the authority to speak over an empty week is delegated to you in Him; it does not depend on there being anything written on the page. These stand on what is written in the first chapter of the Bible and are carried by the Holy Spirit, not by your recovery. What He puts in that week, and when, is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own timing.
- Empty week in front of me, you are not a verdict, and I say so in the name of Jesus. Genesis 1:2 says the Spirit of God moved over a void before anything at all had been made, and the same Spirit is over this page.
- Reading I have been taking every morning since June, that an empty life at forty four means I have been passed over, you were never in the record. It is written that the content came by a word from above the water, and His Spirit is the one brooding, which is not a thing I have to arrange by filling a Tuesday.
- Lord, You are over this blank week the way You were over the first void, and I am not filling it today. I sit with the page open and my hands open and I say so out loud, and I thank You that You are neither male nor female and that the whole of both is over these mornings while there is nothing in them.
Genesis 1:2
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