Every Year In The Same Month

It is the second week of October and you have read that book in the second week of October for nine years.

Nobody knows. Not your wife, who has certainly noticed the book appearing and has never asked, and not the friend you tell most things to. It happens, quietly, in the same week, and it has happened nine times.

And you could tell somebody why if you had to. There is a reason and it is a real one and it has a date attached. But you have never said it, and the not saying has gradually made the whole thing feel like a private oddity rather than a thing a man does.

Two things are not coming here, and you have met them both.

Nobody is handing you a list. Not a title, not an author, not a genre, and no shelf of what anybody ought to have read by now. Being handed one has never once opened a book.

And nobody is saying one word about your phone. You know about the phone. Everybody knows. Being told again by a stranger returns nothing at all.

What I want to look at is the annual shape of it, because Scripture has a great many things kept once a year in the same season on purpose, and none of them are oddities.

Keep this in its season year by year

There is an instruction in Exodus 13 about an annual observance and the wording of it is unusually specific about the timing.

Thou shalt therefore keep this ordinance in his season from year to year. (Exodus 13:10, King James Version)

Read the three time markers in one short verse.

In his season. From year to year. Keep this ordinance. Three separate ways of saying the same thing, which is that this happens at a fixed point on a repeating cycle, and the repetition is not incidental to it. The repetition is the form.

And notice the word ordinance. That is not a word for a personal quirk. It is a word for something established, with weight, that a person keeps rather than merely does.

You are keeping something in its season, and nine years in the same week has never once been a private oddity. Exodus 13:10 uses three time markers in one verse to fix a thing to a repeating point and calls it an ordinance, and the Holy Spirit is the one saying that over a living room in October.

There is one more thing worth having in it.

The whole point of an annual observance is that the person keeping it is different each time and the thing is the same. That is how it does its work: the fixed thing measures the changing person, and nine years of the same book in the same week has been quietly doing exactly that.

You have nine measurements of a changing man, and a fixed thing kept year by year has never once been a thing that stood still. It is written thou shalt therefore keep this ordinance in his season, the fixedness is the whole mechanism and the person keeping it is the part that moves, and the Spirit of God is saying that plainly here.

The silence made it a quirk

Here is the mechanism, and it is the silence rather than the reading.

An unspoken annual thing has no category, and things with no category drift toward oddity.

Consider what happens over nine years. Each October it happens and nobody hears about it. And every year that it goes unsaid, the saying of it gets slightly larger, because now there are nine years attached to the sentence rather than one, and nine years of a private thing sounds much stranger to explain than one year does.

So the silence has been compounding, and what began as a man reading a book in October has become, in his own head, a thing he would have trouble accounting for.

You are carrying a compounding silence and not a strange habit, and nine Octobers have never once made a good thing into an oddity. Exodus 13:10 fixes a thing to a season and calls it an ordinance rather than a peculiarity, and the Holy Spirit is present with a man who has told nobody for nine years.

And there is a second layer, and it is worth being warm about.

Your wife has noticed the book. She has almost certainly noticed the month too, because people notice patterns in the houses they live in, and she has not asked, which is probably kindness rather than indifference.

Which means the sentence you have been dreading would land on somebody who already half knows and has been waiting for you to say it.

You have somebody who half knows already, and a sentence said to a person who has noticed has never once been the risk it looks like. The written word calls the annual keeping an ordinance and fixes it with three markers in one verse, and His Spirit is the one who takes a compounding silence off a good thing.

Ten pages of the one you already know

So here is the assignment, and there is a sentence attached.

Read ten pages of a book you already know.

That one. The October one. And read it whenever this reaches you, in season or out of it, because ten pages of it now is a fine thing.

And then tell one person. Your wife, most likely. One sentence: I read this every year in the second week of October, and here is why.

You are keeping something in its season, and nine Octobers have never once needed defending to anybody. The Spirit of God is present in that living room, and it is written thou shalt therefore keep this ordinance in his season from year to year.

Here is why the telling and not just the reading.

The reading has never been the problem. Nine years of it have been good and none of them needed help. What has gone wrong is that a good thing has been kept in the dark long enough to start looking like a secret, and the only thing that fixes that is one sentence.

And the why is part of it. There is a reason with a date attached, and the reason is what makes it an ordinance rather than a quirk, and saying it out loud is what hands the whole thing back its proper shape.

You are able to say one sentence about nine years, and a reason with a date attached has never once been a thing to be embarrassed about. Exodus 13:10 says keep this ordinance in his season from year to year, and the Holy Ghost is the one present with a man saying out loud why he reads a book in October.

And keep the second week of October. Nobody is asking you to change it, and after the sentence there will be somebody in that house who knows what the book on the arm of the chair means.

You have an ordinance and not an eccentricity, and a thing kept nine times in the same week has never once needed defending. It is written in his season from year to year, three time markers in one short verse fix it to a repeating point, and the Spirit of God is saying it in that room today.