The Book of Remembrance

Ilan started keeping the record at nineteen, and he would tell you it was for his own discipline, and for the first two years that was almost entirely true.

It was not a diary. He is very clear about that. A diary is for feelings and Ilan does not much go in for feelings on paper. It was a record. Dates and short lines. The morning he got up when he did not want to. The week he stopped a conversation about somebody who was not in the room. The thing he returned that nobody would have missed. The amount he did not take when it was there to be taken and no one would ever have known.

Twenty-three years of short lines in three notebooks.

He has never shown it to anybody. He has never said it exists. If you asked him why he kept it he would say discipline, and he would look slightly away when he said it, and he has become aware of the looking away.

Because at some point, and he cannot date it, the record stopped being for him.

It became a submission. Something to be entered into evidence. And Ilan, who is a careful man, has been aware for maybe three years now that a submission implies a court, and a court implies a judge who reads, and that in twenty-three years nothing has ever come back.

In January his brother, who has kept no record of anything and would laugh at the idea, had the year Ilan has been quietly hoping for since he was twenty-five.

Ilan was glad. That is genuinely true, and it is also not the whole of it.

What he felt underneath, and has not said aloud to one human being, was: I have the file. He does not have a file. Has anybody opened mine.

The shame came in behind it the way it always does, because Ilan would tell you, and has taught others, that God is not an examiner.

What finally cracked it was his neighbor's grandmother, who is ninety and speaks to everybody on that street with total disregard for whether she knows them. She stopped him at the gate one Friday afternoon and said: you. Every week you carry that woman's bins out and you put them back. Every week. Do you think nobody sees? I see. I am ninety, I have nothing to do but see.

Do you think nobody sees. I see.

Ilan stood at a gate on a Friday afternoon and found that his face had gone in front of a woman he has spoken to perhaps eleven times, and he could not have explained it to anybody who knew about the notebooks.

And the sentence that arrived, standing there, had nothing to do with his brother.

He thought: I have been keeping a book for twenty-three years, and I have just been told there has been another one open the whole time.

Say the word properly first

Before anything else I want to be plain about what wealth means on this site, because the word is slippery and I would rather be clear than clever with a man standing at a gate.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a verdict, not what is owed. A portion is the old table word for what is set down in front of somebody because they belong at that table, and Scripture takes that ordinary word and does something astonishing with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only sense the word carries here, and it is not a smaller helping given to the people whose file was never opened.

And let me be as plain the other way. Money is not wicked, wanting a year like your brother's is not envy in itself, and twenty-three years of getting up when you did not want to is not something anybody should sneer at. Nothing on this page ties what God does to what you have or to what you give, and that wire is not run here and never will be. If you are genuinely short, if there is a date and a figure and a knot in your stomach, that is a real thing and it deserves a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that.

And whoever taught you to keep the record, and somebody did, in a tradition or a father or a whole way of taking things seriously, is not on trial in this article. Most of what they handed you was good and you have carried it well. What I want to look at is who you thought the reader was, and I would rather the word of God did the looking, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed.

There is a book, and He is the one writing in it

Malachi, at the end of the last book of the Hebrew Scriptures, drops one sentence that almost nobody quotes, and the Holy Spirit has been keeping it for people exactly like you.

Then those who feared the LORD spoke with one another. The LORD paid attention and heard them, and a book of remembrance was written before him of those who feared the LORD and esteemed his name. They shall be mine, says the LORD of hosts, in the day when I make up my treasured possession.Malachi 3:16-17

Notice who is holding the pen.

They were not submitting anything. The text is explicit about what they were doing: they were talking to each other. That is all. And while they talked, somebody was writing, and it was not them.

That is the whole distinction this article exists for, and it is not a small one. A submission is written by the one who needs it read. A remembrance is written by the one who does the remembering, and the person it is about does not have to keep a copy.

You are not a proud man for the notebooks. You are somebody who took faithfulness seriously enough to want it to count for something, and the written word does not scold anybody for that. It shows you a second book and tells you whose handwriting is in it, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a man hear that at a gate as relief rather than as an exposure.

And here is what costs something to say. If God had ever been running a court, you would have every right to your complaint about the unopened file. The reason the complaint has nowhere to go is not that your record was thin. It is that He was never the judge waiting to be persuaded. He was the one writing, the entire time, and a man who is being written about does not need to file anything.

What the twenty-three years were actually doing

You are His treasured possession right now, and that is not a phrase being offered to console a man whose brother had a good January. His word says they shall be mine in the day when I make up my treasured possession, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a settled fact in a body rather than a verse a man agrees with.

Think about what actually broke you open. It wasn't your brother's year. You'd been glad for him and you meant it.

It was a ninety year old woman at a gate saying do you think nobody sees. I see. It was somebody keeping their own record of you, without being asked, without you knowing, for no reason at all except that they had eyes. You were starving to be seen without submitting anything. You still are, and there is nothing weak about that in a careful man.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. Every early morning is in that other book. Every conversation you stopped is in it. Not one of them was evidence, and not one of them was wasted, and both of those are true at once. Jesus said the Father sees what is done in secret, and He said it to people who were being tempted to make sure it was seen, and He was at that gate on Friday before the woman spoke.