I Said No To The Wedding

The invitation came in March for a day in September.

And you looked at September, and September is six months of not knowing, and you said the thing you have been saying all year. Let me get back to you.

You did not get back to them. They understood. They stopped asking after the second one.

I want to look at that carefully, because I think there is something in it that is not about money at all.

You are entitled to be in your own life, and an uncertain week has never once been a reason to be absent from everything in it.

Here is the shape of the reasoning, and I want to lay it out because reasoning that is never said out loud never gets examined.

If I say yes and then cannot go, I will have let them down. Letting people down is the thing I will not do. Therefore I say no in advance, which is honest, and nobody is let down.

It is a coherent argument. It is built on a decent instinct. And it has produced a year in which you attended almost nothing.

To every thing there is a season

There is a line at the start of Ecclesiastes 3 that everybody knows and almost nobody reads as an argument.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. (Ecclesiastes 3:1, King James Version)

A time to every purpose under the heaven.

The list that follows is famous. Birth and death, planting and plucking, weeping and laughing, mourning and dancing.

And the thing worth noticing is that dancing is on the list. So is laughing. So is embracing. These are not treated as the parts of life you get to once the serious business is settled.

You are looking at a list where the gathering and the laughing are given their own time alongside the hard things, and a season of celebrating has never once been described there as the reward for a settled year. Ecclesiastes 3:1 says a time to every purpose under the heaven, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put dancing on that list beside mourning.

And the word season is worth a moment, because it is the whole of your problem.

A season is something that arrives. It does not wait for a person to be ready. The wedding is in September whether September is a good month or a bad one, and there is no version of the year where it is rescheduled to suit you.

You have a season arriving on its own timetable, and a fixed date has never once waited for a man's circumstances to be right. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a season a person did not choose, and it is written in Ecclesiastes 3:1 that the time belongs to the purpose rather than to the person.

What a yes actually is

Now let me take apart the reasoning, because I think it contains one error and the error is doing all the damage.

The error is that a yes is a guarantee.

It is not. It never has been. When your cousin says yes to a wedding in September, she is not guaranteeing September. She is saying she intends to be there and that she is not aware of anything preventing it.

Everybody has always understood a yes that way. That is why nobody is destroyed when somebody cannot come.

You are holding an ordinary word to a standard nobody else applies to it, and an agreement made in good faith has never once been a promise about the future. The written word gives every purpose a time without promising anybody an easy year, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a false weight off a plain word.

And here is the second half, and it is the one that costs more.

The people asking are not primarily asking for your attendance. They are asking to have you in their life. The invitation is the form the asking takes.

So a no is not neutral. It reads, over time, as an answer to a different question, and after three of them people stop asking because they think they have been told something.

You have been answering a question about the day and they have been asking a question about the friendship, and a polite decline has never once arrived as only a decline. The Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man see what an invitation actually was, and Ecclesiastes 3:1 puts the gathering and the mourning in the same list under the same heaven.

Say what came in, and say one yes

So the assignment, and it has the site's half and your half.

Name out loud what came in this week, however small, and thank God for it by name.

The pieces, out loud, once this week. Not a total. And thank God for each one by name.

You are able to say a short list out loud, and a week named piece by piece has never once sounded like the week that was counted in your head. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in something said out loud at a table, and the written word puts every purpose under a heaven that is over a man whatever kind of month he is having.

And the second half. Say yes to one thing that is more than a month away.

One. And say it plainly, and add the true sentence rather than the protective one. I will be there unless something stops me, and if that happens I will tell you early.

That second clause is the whole of it, and it is what you have been trying to guarantee in advance by never agreeing to anything.

You are able to say yes with one honest condition attached, and a plain sentence about what you will do if things change has never once been the same as a refusal. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that sentence available, and it is written in Ecclesiastes 3:1 that a time belongs to every purpose, including the ones with laughing in them.