Four Years and I Still Check

It happens at about the same time most evenings and it takes under a minute, and the minute is not the point.

She is not looking for anything in particular. That is what makes it so hard to explain, even to herself. There is nothing she wants to find. She is not hoping for bad news and she is not hoping for good news, and if you asked her what she was checking for she would not be able to tell you.

She just opens it, and looks, and closes it, and then feels something flat for about half an hour afterwards.

Four years.

Four years is long enough that everybody in her life considers this finished. It is not mentioned. Her friends stopped asking in the first year, and by the second she had stopped raising it herself because there was nothing new to say, and by the third she had begun to be quite convincing about how long ago it all was.

She got on with things. That is true and it should be said. She moved, she changed jobs, she got a dog. There is a whole life there that has been built since, and none of it is a pretense.

And most evenings, for under a minute, she opens the page.

Nobody knows. Not one person, in four years. And that fact, more than the checking itself, is what has quietly turned a habit into something with weight.

That is you, and you have never once said it out loud.

Nothing here is going to shame you

Let me clear that first, because you have been doing a fairly thorough job of it yourself. Scripture already said it in Philippians 3:13, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the work, not the sentence.

Nothing on this page is going to suggest that a person who had really moved on would not be doing this. Nothing here treats four years as evidence of weakness, or of secretly wanting him back, or of a faith that has not taken.

A habit like this is not a measure of how much you loved somebody and it is not a measure of how well you have recovered. It is a groove. It was worn in during a period when checking was the only way you had of knowing anything, and grooves do not close on the same timetable that lives do.

You are not failing at something everybody else has managed. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and it puts no expiry date on the sentence anywhere, and the Holy Spirit does not run a timetable on how long a person takes.

What Paul says, and what he does not

There is a line in Philippians that gets used against people in exactly your position, and it is worth reading properly.

Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before.Philippians 3:13

The half people quote is forgetting those things which are behind. It gets used as an instruction to have stopped feeling something by now, and that is not what it is.

Look at the first clause, which almost nobody quotes. I count not myself to have apprehended. Paul opens by saying he has not arrived. This is a man writing about a process he is in the middle of, not a man describing a completed operation and telling everybody else to catch up.

And look at what forgetting is doing there. He is not describing amnesia and he is not describing feelings. The word is about what he is orienting toward. He is choosing a direction, in a sentence where he has just admitted he has not got there.

So this verse does not say you should have stopped. It says a man who had not arrived kept facing forward, and that this was the one thing he did.

You are not behind on a schedule Scripture set. Scripture says I count not myself to have apprehended, Philippians 3:13, and it puts that in front of the forgetting rather than after it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a person facing forward on evenings when the facing is all there is.

What the checking is actually for

Here is what I think is happening, and you can test it against your own evenings.

You are not looking for information. You said so yourself: there is nothing you want to find. None of that is mine to declare on my own. Scripture said it first in Philippians 3:13, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings it the distance.

You are checking that the story is still there. That it happened, that it was real, that there was once a version of your life with that shape in it. Because everybody stopped asking in the first year, and you stopped raising it in the second, and since then the only place that whole period of your life still exists is inside your own head. Scripture put that in writing long before you read it here, in Philippians 3:13, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes written words land.

The page is the last external evidence that any of it occurred.

That is not obsession. That is a person keeping a receipt for four years of their own life because nobody else in the world is holding one.

You are not required to prove your own history to yourself in private. Scripture says thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book, Psalm 56:8, and there is a record being kept that does not depend on a page, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a real comfort rather than a nice image.

The part that is actually costing you

And here is the thing to change, and it is not the checking.

It is that nobody knows.

Four years of a nightly minute, held entirely alone, has done something the minute itself never would have. It has made an ordinary groove into a secret, and secrets acquire weight simply by being kept. The flat half hour afterwards is not really about him. It is about being the only person on earth who knows what you just did.

One person. Not the story, not an explanation, and not a request for advice, which you do not need. One sentence: I still check his page sometimes, four years on, and I have never told anybody.

What will happen is what always happens. They will say something ordinary. They may say oh, I do that too about somebody entirely different, and there is a very good chance they will, because a great many people are doing this and none of them are telling each other either.

You were not meant to be carrying this on your own. Scripture says confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed, James 5:16, and notice that the healing is attached to the telling rather than to the stopping, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets a sentence like that out of somebody after four years of silence.