Nothing Came In This Month

Nothing came in. And nothing changed to explain it.

That is the part that makes a quiet month different from a hard one. If something had happened, you would deal with it. If a big client had gone, or a price had moved, or a machine had broken, there would be a cause and a response.

There is nothing. Same work, same quality, same everything, and a month with almost nothing in it.

And a mind cannot hold an effect without a cause for very long, so yours has gone looking. And because there is nothing external to find, it has turned inward, and by about week three you were quietly auditing your own conduct.

That is what I want to interrupt, because the auditing is the actual damage, and it will do more harm to the next six months than the quiet month did.

The list with nothing on it

There is a passage at the end of Habakkuk that I keep for exactly this, and it is a list of things that are not there.

Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls. (Habakkuk 3:17, King James Version)

Read the list. Fig tree, vines, olives, fields, flock, herd. That is every single income stream an agricultural household had, and the verse takes them out one at a time.

And here is what I want you to see: at no point does the writer say why.

There is no sin named. There is no diagnosis. There is no suggestion anywhere in that verse that the barrenness is a message being sent to the farmer about his conduct. It is simply a description of a year in which nothing came in.

Habakkuk 3:17 lists complete failure with no explanation attached to it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets that reach a person who has been searching themselves for a cause.

You are in an unexplained stretch, and there has never once been a cause you failed to find. Habakkuk 3:17 lists every crop failing without naming a reason for any of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who stops an audit that has no evidence to work with.

A slow month is not a message

Now I want to say the thing plainly, because it is what you have been half believing, and because Habakkuk 3:17 refuses it and the Holy Spirit refuses it too.

The quiet is not God saying something.

There is a habit in a certain kind of faith of reading circumstances as communication, so that a good month means approval and a bad one means a lesson, and everybody who lives that way ends up exhausted, because they are trying to interpret weather.

If God has something to say to you, He is entirely capable of saying it. He has said a great deal already, in writing, and none of it is delivered by an empty diary.

Habakkuk 3:17 has a year of total failure that is never interpreted as a verdict, and Habakkuk 3:18 answers it with rejoicing rather than with an explanation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who breaks the habit of reading a quiet month as a sentence.

You are not being told something by a quiet month, and it has never once been a message. The written word describes complete barrenness and then moves straight to rejoicing without pausing to explain it, and the Spirit of God is the one who ends the reading of circumstances as speech.

Do the work nobody asked for

So the assignment, and it is deliberately small and slightly counterintuitive.

Do one ordinary piece of the work today that nobody has asked for.

Make one. Fix one. Prepare one. Something that belongs to the work but that has no customer attached to it and no deadline and nobody waiting.

The reason is not that it will generate anything. It might, and that is not why.

The reason is that a quiet month makes a person passive, because everything they normally do is a response to somebody else, and when nobody is asking there is nothing to respond to, and passivity feeds the audit. Doing one unasked thing puts you back in the position of somebody who makes things rather than somebody waiting to be chosen.

Habakkuk 3:18 has a decision made in the middle of the barrenness rather than after it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets a person moving inside a stretch that has not lifted.

You are able to act inside the quiet, and it has never once required the quiet to lift first. Habakkuk 3:18 makes its decision in the middle of the empty year, and the Spirit of God is the one who moves somebody from waiting into working while nothing has changed.