The Notebook I Kept From That Year

It was in the drawer with the spare keys and the instruction manual for a washing machine she no longer owns.

A5, black cover, the elastic gone stretchy. She was looking for a plug adaptor and she found this instead, and she sat down on the floor of her own hallway and read it for twenty-five minutes with her legs out in front of her like a child.

Her handwriting from eleven years ago is rounder than it is now. That was the first thing she noticed and it made her fond of the woman who wrote it, which matters, because of what she read next.

The pages are lists. Not shopping lists. Things she was going to do, in a particular season, having been taught them by people she respected and who were, as far as she could tell then and can still tell now, entirely sincere. Not one of them was a crook. She wants that said. Some of them she still knows.

And she did the things. That is the part that is difficult. This is not a story about a woman who half tried.

She did them for four years with a straight back. And in the notebook, on about the ninth page, there is a line she wrote and underlined, and it is the line she sat on the hallway floor holding, which said, in round eleven year old handwriting: keep going, it is coming.

It did not come.

Not the way it was described. There was no year of return. Things did not open. What actually happened over those four years was ordinary: some good, some hard, a job that ended, a friend who stayed, a run of months she would not repeat.

And somewhere in year five she stopped, quietly, without a decision, the way you stop doing anything you no longer expect to work.

But here is what she has only just seen, sitting on the floor with a stretched elastic band in her hand. She did not just stop doing the things. She stopped expecting anything of God at all. Because the arrangement had been real to her, and when it did not settle, the only conclusion available was that He had declined to pay, and you do not go on being warm toward somebody who owes you and will not look at you.

Eleven years of a small coldness, from a debt that was never actually contracted.

Before we go any further I should say plainly what the word wealth is doing on a page like this, because the name over the door promises one thing and I am going to spend the whole message meaning another. Wealth here is your portion, not your balance. It is what you have been given and who it is from, and it is not a figure and it is never going to be a figure, and I would rather tell you that in the first minute than let you read to the end hoping.

The question nobody has ever been able to answer

There is a moment near the end of the most closely argued letter in the Bible where the writer, having spent eleven chapters building something enormous, suddenly stops arguing and asks three questions in a row. The third one is this.

Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.Romans 11:35

It is a rhetorical question, which means it is asked knowing there is no answer.

Nobody. Nobody has ever handed God something that put Him in debt. Not a single person in the history of the world has opened an account with heaven, because there is no currency He does not already own, no effort that did not come out of strength He supplied, and no faithfulness that was not itself a gift arriving in your hands before you spent it.

And I want to be very careful here, because there is a cruel way to say this and I am not going to say it that way.

The cruel version is: you were greedy and now you are being corrected. That is not what happened to you. What happened to you is that somebody good and sincere handed you a shape, and you took it seriously, and you were faithful inside it for four years, and the shape had a flaw in it that was not yours and that you had no way of seeing from inside. I am not putting my own idea over you: that is what the written word says, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes it land.

Nobody who taught you that is on trial here. I am not naming anyone, I am not making a case, and I am not going to let you leave this message feeling like a fool. You were not a fool. You were a woman with a notebook who meant it.

But look what the ledger cost you, because that is the actual injury and it is not the money.

A ledger turns a Father into a counterparty. It puts a small permanent squint into every prayer, because you cannot be at ease with someone you are quietly auditing. It makes His kindnesses look like part payments instead of gifts. And when nothing arrives on the terms you were given, the ledger has only one entry left to write, and it writes it about Him. That is not my opinion. It is what the word says, and His Spirit is the one who carries it.

That is the eleven years of coldness. Not unbelief. Accountancy.

So here is what I am handing you instead, and I promise it is bigger, though it will not look it for a moment.

From Him and through Him and to Him are all things. That is the sentence that comes immediately after the question, and it is not a consolation prize. It is the actual position. You are not a creditor standing outside a locked office. You are inside the house of the One that everything came from in the first place, and the reason nothing you gave put Him in your debt is the same reason nothing you lack puts you outside His reach. The written word settles that, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it real in a body.

And if what you are carrying this month is a real shortfall, that is real and it is not what this message is about, and needing help with it is not a spiritual failure of any kind.