She does it in the shower, mostly. Sometimes on the walk back from the school gate.
She amends the record.
Not out loud. There is nothing to see. From the outside she is a woman walking home with a bag over her shoulder. On the inside she is doing the thing she has done nearly every day for years, which is going through the version of events certain people hold about her and correcting it, line by line, patiently, the way you would correct a document.
She adds the context that was missing. She moves one thing earlier in the sequence, because the order matters and the order is what everybody got wrong. She takes out the sentence that was never true and has somehow become the headline. She puts in what she was actually carrying that month, which nobody knew and which she has never told anyone and is not going to.
And every day, the record goes back to how it was, and the next day she starts again.
Then one afternoon last spring, standing at the kitchen sink with her hands in the water, a thought arrived that she had never had before and could not get rid of afterwards.
Nobody has opened it.
Not one of them. Not this year, not last year. The file she has been meticulously amending has been shut in a drawer in somebody else's house since about six weeks after the whole thing happened, and the amendments have been going into a document that has not been read by a single human being in four years.
She said it was the strangest grief. She had assumed the work was pointless because it never changed anything. It turned out to be worse than pointless. It was maintenance on a building nobody lives in.
I am not going to ask you what is in your file. Not a line of it. God has read it and you have read it and that is the whole readership it requires.
What I want is the drawer.
Hidden, which is not the same as erased
Colossians 3 has a sentence in it that reads like a riddle until the day it stops being one.
For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.Colossians 3:3
Hid is not the word most of us would have picked. We would have picked cleared, or restored, or vindicated. Hidden sounds like something you would want undone.
But look at where it is hidden, because that is the whole of it. Not hidden from view in general. Hidden with Christ in God, which is not a cupboard. It is the safest location named anywhere in Scripture, and the point of putting a thing there is not concealment. It is that nothing can be got at.
Now put that beside the drawer.
You have a life that is not stored in anybody's file, and Colossians 3:3 puts it somewhere no neighbor, no relative and no committee has access to, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a woman at a sink believe a sentence like that.
Understand what that does to the correcting. The correcting assumes the file is where you are kept. That is the premise underneath every amendment made in every shower for four years: that if the document were accurate, you would be all right, and while it is inaccurate, some part of you is still wrong.
Colossians 3:3 says the document was never the location.
I want to be very careful about what I am not saying, because this can be heard as a shrug and it is anything but. I am not saying the record does not matter. Where it is wrong, it is wrong, and where somebody was genuinely hurt, that is real and it is theirs and nothing here waves it through. If there is a true amend you can honestly make, make it, and make it because it is right rather than because it fixes your standing.
What I am saying is that you are already located somewhere the file cannot reach. Colossians 3:3 has your life hid with Christ in God in the present tense while His Spirit holds it there, and no correction ever entered in a shower has moved it one inch either way, because it was never in the drawer to begin with.
And here is the part I would stand up for. The verse goes on. Verse 4 says that when Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall you also appear with Him in glory. So the hiddenness is not permanent and it is not a compromise. There is a public appearing in that chapter, and it is not scheduled by a village, and it is not on the agenda of any meeting that could have been called about you.
You have been trying to get the record straight in the meantime, and the meantime already has you kept, because Colossians 3:3 was written for exactly that stretch of a person's life and the Holy Spirit has been holding you inside it the whole way.
Here is the turn, and I want you to hear how much freedom is in it, because it will sound like a loss for about a minute.
You are going to stop editing.
Not because the record is right. It probably is not. Not because it does not sting; it does. You are going to stop because there is no reader, and because the person you have been assembling the corrected version for is not out there in a house somewhere waiting to receive it. She is you, at a sink, doing maintenance on an empty building.
You are held today without one line of that document being changed, and Colossians 3:3 puts your life in a place nobody can request a copy from, and the Holy Spirit has been keeping it there through every year of amendments.
They keep whatever version they hold. It is theirs. They are entitled to it, they owe you nothing, and nothing here turns you against them or asks them to open anything.
And you keep what was actually given to you, which is a life stored with Christ in God rather than filed in a village, and the appearing in Colossians 3:4 is not something a room decides the date of. What He does about their version, and whether it is ever corrected on this side of anything, is His to decide and He may answer in His own way. What is settled today is where you are kept.
One straight word before the end. If the years of this have taken you somewhere darker than a file, if any part of you has begun to think the record would simply be cleaner without you in it at all, that is not something to carry home from the school gate. Tell one person out loud today, and tell your doctor. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour and a real person answers. Wherever you live there is a line and somebody is awake right now. Scripture says your life is hid with Christ this minute, His Spirit is with you in this hour, and you are worth the call.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud with your hands open. This standing was not extended as a kindness and cannot be withdrawn as one: it is yours in Christ, given rather than earned, and exercised in His Name. Speak them, keep your hands turned over, and leave the outcome with Him.
- File I have been amending for years, you are closed and I am not editing you again. Colossians 3:3 says my life is hid with Christ in God, so I am not stored in a drawer in somebody else's house, and the Holy Spirit is keeping me where He put me.
- Fear that says I am only clear once the record is right, you are answered. In the name of Jesus their memory is not my identity, because Colossians 3:4 says Christ is my life and the appearing is His to schedule and not a village's.
- God, You hid me in the safest place there is and You never once asked me to correct my way out of it. Colossians 3:3 says hid with Christ in God, so I am held today, I do not have to change one mind, and Your Spirit is the one who has been reading me the whole time.
Colossians 3:3
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
