What to Declare in a Season That Won't End

Most teaching about hard times assumes a short crisis with a visible end. Hold on, it says. This will pass. And often it does.

Some seasons do not pass on that timescale. A chronic illness. A marriage that has been distant for years. A child who is not speaking to you. Work that grinds. These require something sturdier than encouragement to endure a little longer, because the little longer has already been five years.

Scripture Has a Category for This

The Bible is not squeamish about long difficulty, and its arithmetic is worth dwelling on.

• Israel spent four hundred and thirty years in Egypt. Generations were born, laboured and died in slavery having heard the promise and seen nothing.
• Joseph was seventeen when he dreamed and thirty when he stood before Pharaoh. Thirteen years, most of them in a pit, a household and a prison.
• David was anointed king as a youth and hunted across the wilderness for well over a decade before he wore the crown.
• Abraham waited twenty-five years between the promise of a son and the birth of Isaac, and produced Ishmael somewhere in the middle out of sheer impatience.
• Paul's thorn was never removed at all.

None of these are presented as failures of faith. They are the middle of the story, which is precisely the part whose shape you cannot see while standing in it.

The Verse Written From the Ruins

Lamentations 3:22-23 appears on a great many cards and cushions, almost always detached from where it comes from.

Lamentations is a funeral poem for a destroyed city. Jerusalem has fallen. The temple is rubble. The writer describes, in unsparing detail, siege conditions that included starvation and worse. Three chapters in, having catalogued the horror, he writes this:

He is not saying it because circumstances have improved. He is saying it in the middle of the worst thing that had ever happened to his nation, as a deliberate act of memory against the evidence directly in front of him.

Read the verses immediately before. This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. He is doing something on purpose. The recollection is a choice made in defiance of what he can see, and that is what declaration in a long season actually looks like. Not denial of the ruins. A decision about what else is true while standing in them.

Four Hundred Years of Silence

Between Malachi and Matthew there is a gap of roughly four centuries in which no prophet speaks. The people who lived through it had the promises, the Scriptures and no fresh word at all, across twelve or fifteen generations.

It is worth holding that against the assumption that God's silence indicates His absence. Empires rose and fell over that period. Families were born, married and buried without hearing anything new. And then an angel appeared to an elderly priest in the temple, and the silence broke.

Israel in Egypt experienced something similar and Exodus records the moment it ended in unusual language.

Remembered does not mean He had forgotten. In Hebrew usage, to remember is to act on what one has always known. The verse marks the point where long-held intention becomes visible movement, and from the inside those four hundred years would have been indistinguishable from abandonment.

Lament Is Not the Opposite of Faith

A hard season that goes on generally produces complaint, and many believers add guilt about the complaining to the original difficulty.

Scripture does not support the guilt. Psalm 13 asks how long four times in two verses. Habakkuk opens by accusing God of not listening. Jeremiah, in a passage rarely read aloud, tells God He has deceived him. The book of Job is largely a sustained protest, and God's verdict at the end favours the protester over his theologically careful friends.

What distinguishes biblical lament from mere grumbling is direction. Israel in the wilderness murmured to one another about God; the psalmists complained to God about their circumstances. One is a conversation He is excluded from. The other is prayer, however rough.

If you have been holding your disappointment at a polite distance for two years, consider bringing it into the room. He is not fragile, and He is already aware.

Ten Declarations for the Long Middle

• His compassions fail not; they are new every morning. (Lamentations 3:22-23)
• Let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not. (Galatians 6:9)
• Our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. (2 Corinthians 4:17)
• I am troubled on every side, yet not distressed; perplexed, but not in despair. (2 Corinthians 4:8)
• The LORD is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him. (Lamentations 3:24)
• He knoweth the way that I take: when he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold. (Job 23:10)
• Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning. (Psalm 30:5)
• My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever. (Psalm 73:26)
• I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living. (Psalm 27:13)
• He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. (Isaiah 40:29)

Second Corinthians 4:17 repays attention, because Paul's list of his own light affliction appears two chapters later: five times thirty-nine lashes, three shipwrecks, a night and a day in the deep, hunger, cold, imprisonment. He is not minimising suffering from a position of comfort. He is weighing it against something he considers heavier.

The Declaration Changes as the Season Lengthens

Early on you will be declaring for rescue, and that is right. Later the honest declaration may be for endurance. Later still it may be nothing more than that God is good and you are not letting go.

This is not a downgrading of faith. It is maturity, and the third is by some distance the hardest to say.

Watch the three men in Daniel do all three inside a single sentence. Our God is able to deliver us. He will deliver us. But if not, we still will not bow. Every clause is faith, including the last, and it was in the fire rather than instead of it that a fourth figure appeared.

Early on you declare for rescue. Later, for endurance. Later still, simply that He is good. All three are Scripture, and the third costs the most.

Declare Bible

The Refining Image, Handled Carefully

Job 23:10 says that when he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold, and the refining metaphor appears across Scripture. It is true and it is frequently misused.

Note who says it. Job says it, about himself, in the middle of his own suffering. It is a sufferer's confession, not a bystander's explanation. There is a considerable difference between a person in the furnace saying this is refining me and a comfortable observer saying it about them.

God never explains Job's suffering to Job. The reader is given a glimpse in chapters one and two; Job never is. He receives God's presence and a series of questions about wild goats and storehouses of snow, and it is enough. Which suggests that the goal of a hard season is not the acquisition of an explanation.

Perseverance Produces Something

Paul makes a claim about suffering that is easy to quote and difficult to believe from inside it.

The word rendered patience is hupomone, and it does not mean placid waiting. It is a compound of under and remain: to stay put under a weight. The Greek fathers used it of a soldier holding a position.

And experience translates dokime, a term from metallurgy meaning tested and found genuine. It describes the character of something that has been through a process and proved sound.

So the chain is: pressure produces the capacity to remain under pressure, which produces proven character, which produces hope. Hope arrives last in that sequence, which is why it so often feels absent early. You are not lacking faith. You are at the beginning of a chain that has hope at the far end of it.

Habakkuk's Conclusion

The prophet Habakkuk spends two chapters complaining that God is doing nothing about injustice, receives an answer he finds worse than the silence, and argues further. It is one of the most confrontational books in Scripture.

It ends like this.

He lists total agricultural failure, item by item, which in that economy meant destitution and probably famine. Nothing in his circumstances has improved between chapter one and chapter three.

The yet is the whole book. It is not denial and it is not resolution. It is a decision made in full view of the loss, and it is the most mature form a declaration takes.

Someone to Hold Your Arms

There is a scene in Exodus that describes what endurance actually requires, and it is not willpower.

Israel is fighting Amalek. As long as Moses holds up his hands, Israel prevails; when he lowers them, Amalek does. And then the detail that makes the passage useful: Moses' hands were heavy.

Three provisions, all practical. A stone to sit on, because he could not keep standing. Two men, one on each side, because he could not keep his own arms up. And the result: steady until sundown.

Nobody suggests he should have managed alone, and the text records no embarrassment. In a long season the equivalent provisions are equally unglamorous — someone who prays when you cannot, someone who checks in on the anniversary, someone who brings food without asking whether you need it.

If you have been trying to hold your own arms up for two years, the passage suggests that was never the arrangement.

Keep a Written Record

One practical thing, and it matters more than it sounds.

Write the date and one line each time something small goes right. A good hour. An unexpected kindness. A night you slept. In a long season your memory will quietly edit itself towards the difficulty, and a written record is the only thing that will argue back.

This is precisely the instinct behind the stones Israel piled at the Jordan. Take twelve stones, Joshua says, that this may be a sign among you, so that when your children ask what these stones mean, you will have something to point at. Memory is not reliable enough to carry a promise across years. Objects and records are.

Twenty months into a hard season, the ability to read back a page of small mercies is a genuine defence against despair. You will not believe you wrote some of them.

What Not to Say to Someone in a Long Season

People suffering over years report the same small set of unhelpful sentences, and most of them are said with genuine kindness.

• Everything happens for a reason. Not in the Bible, and it offers a philosophy where a person wanted company.
• God won't give you more than you can handle. A misreading of 1 Corinthians 10:13, which is about temptation rather than suffering. Paul elsewhere says he was pressed out of measure, above strength, so that he despaired even of life.
• Have you thought about... Almost certainly, at three in the morning, repeatedly, for a year.
• At least... Any sentence beginning this way is a request that they feel differently than they do.
• You're so strong. Frequently heard as an instruction to continue performing strength.

What people in long difficulty ask for is remarkably consistent: someone who keeps turning up, remembers the specifics, and does not require progress as the condition of continued attention.

The Difference Between a Season and a Situation

It helps to be honest about which of these you are in, because they call for different things.

A season has an end, even if you cannot see it. Illness that will resolve, a hard year at work, a stretch of financial pressure with a visible other side. The counsel for a season is endurance, and endurance is sustained by the knowledge that this will not always be so.

A situation may not end. A permanent disability, a bereavement, an estranged child who does not return, a diagnosis that will not reverse. The counsel here is different, and pretending otherwise is unkind.

For a situation, the questions change. Not how do I get through this but how do I live well inside it. Not when will this lift but what is still good, and available, and mine.

Paul's thorn belongs in the second category. He asked three times, received a no, and then wrote some of the most confident material in the New Testament while carrying it. The grace was not deliverance. It was sufficiency inside the thing that did not go.

There is no shame in taking years to make that shift. It is one of the hardest pieces of work a believer ever does, and nobody does it quickly.

Endurance Has a Company

Hebrews 11 lists the faithful, and most readers stop at the conquerors. The chapter does not.

Then comes the sentence that should be read slowly: of whom the world was not worthy. The verdict is passed on the world, not on them.

And a few lines later: these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise. They died without seeing it. The chapter commends them anyway, and explicitly says God had provided some better thing for them.

So the roll of honour includes people whose situations never resolved. If your season does not end this side of the grave, you are not outside the list. You are somewhere in the middle of it.

The Sorrow That Does Not Have to Be Explained

One of the more useful things a long season teaches is that God does not owe an explanation and generally does not give one.

Job asked for a hearing and received a whirlwind full of questions about ostriches and the treasures of the snow. Not one of them addressed his losses. And yet Job's response is not frustration but surrender: I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee.

Something was given that was better than an answer, and readers have argued about what it was for three thousand years. The nearest description is presence. He did not learn why. He met the person who knew, and that turned out to be sufficient.

If you have been waiting for an explanation before you can trust again, it is worth considering that the explanation may not come, and that this has not stopped anybody in Scripture from arriving somewhere solid.

Waiting Is Not Passive in Hebrew

The word translated wait in Isaiah 40:31 is qavah, and its root carries the sense of twisting or binding together, as strands are twisted into a rope.

To wait, in that sense, is to be bound together with the one you are waiting for. It is not the passive endurance of a delay. It is an active entwining, and strength is renewed through the binding rather than after the wait is over.

Notice too the descending order of the promises: mount up, run, walk. Most preaching treats flying as the climax. The text puts walking last, and walking without fainting is the hardest of the three to sustain across years.

If all you are managing today is walking and not fainting, you are inside the final and highest clause of the verse.