The List I Made in the Dark

Sarah did not hesitate on the Friday. She wants that on the record, because everything that happened afterward has made her doubt it.

Her friend rang at about six. It was the kind of call where the person is being extremely calm and that is how you know. There was a deposit and a date and a landlord and a small child, and Sarah said, before the sentence was finished, don't be silly, I'll send it now, and she did, from her kitchen, while the kettle was on.

She meant it. There was no calculation. She has known that woman for nineteen years and she has met the child.

She felt genuinely happy about it for approximately twenty-six hours.

And then at about two on the Sunday morning she was lying in the dark with her eyes open making a list.

The dentist, which is now March. The train to see her brother at Easter, which she had told him she was coming to, and will now have to phone about. The coat, which she does not need and has been looking at for four months. A margin, which is the thing she has spent two years building and which is the actual item, and which she took a third out of on a Friday evening while the kettle was on.

She did not regret it. That is the part she cannot explain to anybody, which is why she has told nobody. She would do it again on Monday. And she lay in the dark making a list at two in the morning with her jaw tight and something in her chest that felt like being told off.

What got her was the following week. She was at that friend's flat, and the child, who is four, brought her a drawing that was mostly orange, and then climbed onto the sofa beside her and sat there, extremely close, and did not say anything at all.

The friend said, from the kitchen, not making a thing of it: she does that with people she thinks are staying.

People she thinks are staying.

Sarah sat on somebody else's sofa with a mostly orange drawing on her knee and had to look at the ceiling for a second, and she could not have explained it to anybody who had seen the list.

And the sentence that arrived, sitting there, had nothing to do with the deposit.

She thought: I gave it in nine seconds and I have been paying for it in the dark ever since, and it has already landed somewhere and I never even looked.

Let me 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 with you than clever.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a margin, not what is left after Friday. 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 now the most important paragraph in this article, so I will say it as plainly as I know how. There is no ask on this page. Nothing here is going to suggest that you give anything to anybody, and there is no link, and there is no cause, and this site will never once tell you that giving produces a return, in any form, however gently it is put. That wire does not exist here and it never will. You gave money to a friend on a Friday. That is between you and her and God, and this article has no interest in it except one: I want you to be able to sleep.

That is the whole job. Not to grade the gift. Not to tell you it will come back. To sit with you at two in the morning, and I would rather the word of God sat there, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at what is going on.

You are not too far along for this to be about you. The written word says otherwise, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes otherwise true in a body.

He already knows the list

Jesus says something about anxiety that is usually quoted at people who have plenty, and it was originally said to people who genuinely did not.

Therefore do not be anxious, saying, What shall we eat? or What shall we drink? or What shall we wear? For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all.Matthew 6:31-32

Look at the last six words, because they are the ones for two in the morning.

He does not say those things do not matter. He lists them, specifically, food and drink and clothing, which is to say the exact category your dentist appointment and your train ticket and your coat belong to. He never once suggests it is unspiritual to need them.

He says your Father knows that you need them all.

Knows. Already. Before the list was made. The list you were composing in the dark on Sunday was not new information being submitted upward. It was a list He could have written for you on Friday afternoon, item by item, including the coat, and He was not surprised by a single line of it.

You are not a woman who gave badly. You are somebody whose nervous system did the arithmetic twenty-six hours later, which is what nervous systems do, and the written word does not scold anybody for that. It says the Father knows, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between agreeing with that and a jaw actually unclenching.

And here is what is true of you tonight, before one thing about the margin changes. You are provided for and your hands are open, and those two facts do not compete. His word says He knows what you need, present tense, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a settled thing in a body at two in the morning rather than a verse you have heard.

What the list was actually doing

Think about what got you on that sofa. It wasn't the drawing. You have been given a hundred drawings.

It was: she does that with people she thinks are staying. It was one throwaway sentence telling you the gift had already arrived somewhere, in a form nobody could put on a list, while you were still costing it out in the dark. You were starving to know it had landed, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as needing thanks, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a person and not merely about them.

That is the honest thing under the list. It was not regret and it was not resentment. It was your body trying to work out whether it was now unsafe, and the only way it knows how to check is to count what is left, and it will do that at two in the morning whether or not you have made peace with anything.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. Nobody has been left to work this out alone. Jesus fed a crowd of thousands from somebody else's packed lunch, which means the arithmetic in that field never once depended on the boy who handed it over, and He was in that dark bedroom at two while the list was being made.