The List That Was Never a Contract

Rhona still has the notebook, and the handwriting in the front is noticeably neater than the handwriting in the back, which is the whole story in one detail.

She had left church at nineteen and come back at thirty-four, and she came back the way careful people come back: quietly, at the edge, taking nothing on trust. And when she decided to take it seriously she took it seriously the way she takes everything seriously, which is to say she made a list.

The list was not superstitious. She would want that said. It was drawn from good books by serious people and it was all defensible. Read this much. Give this much, quietly, so nobody knew. Get up at this hour. Confess honestly, name the thing, do not soften it. Forgive the two people. Stop the habit. Say the words out loud rather than only thinking them.

She did every item on that list for four years.

Not perfectly. She would want that said too, because she has spent a lot of the last year wondering whether the imperfection was the problem, and that particular thought has done her more damage than any of the rest of it.

At the end of the four years the thing she had been carrying was exactly where it had been at the start.

And in the September she sat in her kitchen with the notebook in front of her and looked at four years of neat, then less neat, then almost angry handwriting, and she said, out loud, to nobody: I did it. I actually did all of it.

And then, immediately, the second sentence, the one that frightened her: so what was wrong with me.

That is the sentence this article exists for, and I want to get to it properly, so I will not rush at it.

What finally cracked her open was her neighbor's dog, of all things in the world. An old collie who has decided over about a year that Rhona's back step is his and who comes and leans, with his entire weight, against whoever is sitting on it, and does not want anything, and will not go away.

She was sitting out there in October and that dog came and leaned on her, and she put her hand on his head and said, without meaning to say anything: you don't want anything off me, do you.

You don't want anything off me.

Rhona sat on a cold back step with a borrowed dog leaning on her leg and found that her face had gone, and she could not have explained it to anybody who had ever seen the notebook.

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

She thought: I have spent four years operating a mechanism, and I have never once been leaned on.

Let me say the word properly first

Before we go on I want to be plain about what wealth means on this site, because it is a slippery word and I would rather be honest than impressive with a woman sitting on a cold step.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a result, 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 remarkable 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 handed to the people whose four years produced nothing.

And let me be as plain the other way. Money is not wicked, wanting an answer is not a sin, and reading and giving and getting up early and forgiving two people are all genuinely good. This article is not going to tell you the list was rubbish, because it was not. 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 truly short, if there is a date and a figure and a knot in your stomach, that is real and deserves a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that.

And whoever gave you the list is not on trial here either. I do not know their name and I would not use it. Most of the items were good and they meant every one of them. What I want to look at is the word mechanism, and I would rather the word of God did the looking, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed.

Not because of works done by us

Paul writes one sentence to Titus about how any of this ever happens, and he is not scolding anybody when he writes it. He is describing.

He saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit.Titus 3:5

Look at where the weight falls. Not because of works done by us in righteousness. He does not say those works are bad. He is writing to a man whose entire job is to encourage people to do them. He says they are not the cause.

And then he gives the actual cause, and it is four words long: according to his own mercy.

His own. Not his mercy in response to. Not his mercy released by. His own, which is to say it starts on His side of the room and always did, and a thing that starts on His side of the room cannot be started from yours.

You are not defective. You are somebody who was handed a set of genuinely good practices and, quite reasonably, and with nobody warning you, began to operate them as a switch. The written word does not shame anybody for that, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a person hear this on a back step as relief rather than as one more thing they got wrong.

And here is the sentence that has to be said very carefully, because getting it wrong does real damage. The four years did not fail because you did them imperfectly. That thought is the most cruel one in this whole article and it is also the least true. Nothing you did was a lever, so nothing you did could have slipped.

What the four years were actually doing

You have been held according to His own mercy the entire time, and that is not a consolation being offered now that the notebook is full. His word says He saved us according to His own mercy, in the past tense as an accomplished thing and in the present tense as a standing state, and His Spirit is named in that same sentence as the one who carries it, which is precisely why it does not depend on a method.

Think about what actually broke you open. It wasn't the notebook. You'd looked at the notebook a hundred times.

It was a borrowed dog leaning his whole weight on your leg and wanting absolutely nothing. It was being with something that had no interest at all in your compliance. You were starving to be leaned on rather than to be operated. You still are, and there is nothing self-indulgent in that.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. Every early morning was seen. Every quiet gift nobody knew about was seen. Not one of them was a lever and not one of them was wasted, and both of those are true at the same time. Jesus spent most of a night on a hillside doing nothing anybody could have measured, and He was on the back step in October before the dog got there.