No Count Against Me

Beverley has been waiting for a letter for about nine years and there is no letter.

She could not tell you what it would say. She has never pictured the wording. It is not a specific fear with a specific content, which is exactly what makes it so difficult to answer: it is a posture, a way of opening post, a small tightening when an unfamiliar number rings.

The feeling is that somewhere, in an office she has never seen, the whole of it is being added up. Not judged, not discussed. Added. And that at some point, on a Tuesday, the total will be presented.

She is a sensible woman. If you said this to her in plain words she would agree instantly that no such office exists, and she would say so with some impatience, because she is not silly and she does not like being talked to as though she were.

And she would go home and open the post the same way.

Here is where it comes from, and it is not from religion, or not mainly.

It comes from the fact that everything else in her life does work that way. The bank does. The credit file does. The years of contributions do. Her entire adult experience is of systems that quietly accumulate and then produce a figure, and no reasonable person could be blamed for assuming that the biggest account of all is being run on the same principle.

So she has been living as though there is a running total, and the running total has been doing what a running total does, which is to make every new item worse than the last one, because it is added to everything before it.

And this is where I stop writing about Beverley, because you have been waiting for something too.

I am not going to ask what you think would be on it. That is yours and it stays yours.

Find where He put it

I want to give you a sentence written by a man who had been told he was dying and then was not, and who wrote down afterwards what he had understood in the meantime.

Thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back.Isaiah 38:17

Behind thy back.

Sit with the physical picture, because it is not a poetic vagueness, it is a very specific place, and the place is the whole argument.

Behind your back is the one location you cannot see from. It is not filed. It is not stored somewhere retrievable. It is not in a drawer that could be opened on a Tuesday. It is put where the one holding it has deliberately arranged not to look.

And the word all is in there too, doing exactly what it does in every other verse you have ever tried not to believe. Not most. Not the ones with mitigating circumstances. All.

So take that where you actually open the post. There is no total being kept on you, and Isaiah 38:17 says God has cast all of it behind His back, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land in a person who has been braced for nine years.

Now here is the part that goes to the mechanism rather than the feeling, because your feeling is downstream of a belief about how accounts work.

An account requires a keeper. It cannot run itself. Somebody has to be adding, and the only being with standing to keep that particular account has stated, in writing, what He did with it, and it was not filing. The written word has Him disposing of it, and the Spirit of God is not maintaining a copy.