I Will Bless Him for the Counsel

He keeps a gratitude list. Actually keeps one, in a notebook, which is more than most people manage.

And it is a good list. The house. The recovery in 2019. His daughter's wedding. The job that came through in the November when there was nothing. The friend who turned up. He reads it back sometimes and he means every line of it and it does him good.

Every single item on that list is a thing that arrived.

Now here is what happened in October, and it has been quietly working on him ever since.

He met a man at a funeral he had not seen in twenty years, and they got talking, and it came up that this man had gone into a particular business arrangement in 2006 that took nine years and most of his marriage to get out from under.

And the reason it came up is that the same arrangement had been offered to him. In 2006. Same man, same terms, same room.

And he had said no. And he could not, standing in that car park, remember a single reason why. There was no dramatic moment. There was a Tuesday, and a phone call he did not return, and a vague sense that he did not want to, and then it went away and he never thought about it again for nineteen years.

He drove home from that funeral doing arithmetic he had never done in his life, and the arithmetic was: how many of those are there.

There is a whole category of goodness you have never once thanked Him for

Look at what David says he is going to bless God for, because it is not the thing anybody expects.

I will bless the LORD, who hath given me counsel: my reins also instruct me in the night seasons (Psalm 16:7).

Counsel. Not rescue, not provision, not the outcome. Guidance. The being told which way. And then that odd second half about the night seasons, which is about the inner sense of things that arrives when a man is lying awake and cannot say where it came from.

David blesses God for the steering.

Most of us bless God for the arriving. We are grateful when the thing lands. What almost nobody thanks Him for is the turning: the road not taken, the door that quietly did not open, the vague reluctance on a Tuesday that had no argument behind it and saved nineteen years.

You have been steered a great many times and you have thanked Him for almost none of it. The word says He gives counsel and instructs in the night seasons, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the one who guides into all truth (John 16:13), which means the vague reluctance was not vague at the source.

Why the ditches are invisible

Here is the reason your list only has arrivals on it, and it is not ingratitude.

A thing that arrives is visible. It has a date. You can point at it. A thing you were kept out of leaves no evidence at all, because nothing happened, and nothing happening does not generate a memory.

So the whole category is structurally invisible. Not hidden by God, simply undetectable by a person living forwards. You only ever find one by accident, in a car park, at a funeral, twenty years later.

Which means your list is not wrong. It is short by design, and it has been short for decades, and nobody could have told you.

You are being shown one so that you will believe in the others. Scripture says the steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD (Psalm 37:23), and ordered means arranged in advance rather than approved afterwards, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that ordering in a man's ordinary week without announcing Himself.

The night seasons

That phrase deserves a moment, because you have had them and never named them.

The night seasons are the hours when a man is not deciding anything and something settles in him anyway. The unease he cannot argue for. The peace about a thing everybody told him to worry about. The name that comes to mind at three in the morning.

David says his inner life instructs him then, and he does not treat that as mysticism or as indigestion. He treats it as God's counsel arriving by the route God chose, and he blesses Him for it.

You have been counseled in your own night seasons and you have called it instinct. The written word calls it counsel and puts God's name on it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does it, because Scripture says the sheep know His voice even when they could not tell you how they know it.

And here is the honest limit, because we do not oversell. Nothing in this article says every reluctance you ever felt was God, and I am not going to hand you a system for reading your own hunches. Some of them were you. What is settled is that God gives counsel, that He has given it to you, and that a whole shelf of your life has never been thanked for.