The notebook · September 15, 2026

The date I gave

In the spring I gave God a date. I did not tell anyone, which should have told me something.

It was a specific request, in a matter that had dragged on long enough that I knew exactly what to ask for. One evening, instead of saying the same thing again, I added a line: by then. A real date, with a month and a number in it. I remember thinking it was very grown up of me.

I think I believed I was doing something brave. Setting a term exposes you. I told myself I was taking a risk, putting something on the table, making sure the request would not stay in that comfortable haze where you can wait indefinitely and never have to notice that nothing came.

Psalm 13 does this too, and more honestly than I did.

How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?

Psalm 13:1 (World English Bible)

Except that it asks the question and I supplied the answer. It asks how long. I said how long.

The date went past a few weeks ago. Nothing had moved. And what I felt when I noticed, in the evening, was not disappointment. It was something considerably more embarrassing. It was relief.

It took me a while to work out why. As long as the date stood, I had to believe in a precise way. I had to expect a definite thing at a named moment and hold that expectation every day, which is tiring and leaves no room to rearrange the story afterwards. The morning after the deadline, I was free to go back to a vaguer sort of hope. The kind that asks nothing, that cannot be checked, that cannot fail because it never says when.

So the date was not a commitment, it was cover. It turned out to be a deadline on my own effort, not on his patience.

I do not know what to make of that relief. There is a reading where it is a good sign, where something in me knows the request was not the right size and lets go of it. There is another where I simply found a way to stop risking anything. I am not deciding between them.

What I notice is that I have set myself another one. Further out. And I have not told anyone about that one either.

In Manna, one prayer a day, with no date at the bottom of the page.