Take the Tally Out of Your Own Hand

Yolanda has been running her own case for six years and has never once adjourned it.

She is thorough. That is what she would say about herself if you asked her to be honest, and she would say it with a certain pride, because thoroughness is a virtue and she has always been the one who does not let herself off.

So the file is complete. Everything is in it. Not just the events, which would be one thing, but the near misses, the intentions, the things she thought about doing and did not, the moment in a conversation when she noticed herself choosing the softer version of a sentence.

She keeps all of it. She could produce any of it instantly.

And she is the one who prosecutes it, at various hours, and she is also the clerk who maintains it, and she is also the jury, and it will not surprise you to learn that the jury has never once returned in her favor.

Here is what she has never asked, in six years.

Who appointed her.

Not who is to blame. Who gave her the office. Because a person does not get to be prosecutor and clerk and jury of a case by wanting to be. Those are appointments. Somebody grants them. And she has never once looked at the paperwork on her own commission, because from the inside it never felt like an office, it felt like taking responsibility, and taking responsibility is a good thing that decent people do.

That is how the office got created. It walked in wearing the coat of a virtue.

And this is where I stop writing about Yolanda, because you have a file.

I am not going to ask what is in it, and I am certainly not going to ask you to read from it. That is yours and it stays yours.

The question in the middle of the psalm

I want to give you a question that stops the whole proceeding, and it is a question rather than a statement, which is why it works on somebody who is good at arguing.

If thou, LORD, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared.Psalm 130:3

Mark, in that older English, means exactly what your file means. To note down. To keep a record of. To maintain a tally that can be produced.

So Psalm 130 asks: if God kept the record the way you have been keeping the record, who is left standing. The Holy Spirit put that question in the middle of a psalm rather than at the end of an argument, which is how a question gets to do its work.

And the answer, which the psalm does not bother to write because it is obvious, is nobody. Not one person. Not the writer, not the reader, not the best person you know, not anybody in the building.

Which means the standard you have been applying to yourself for six years is a standard that God does not apply to anybody, including you. That is not leniency; it is the actual arrangement, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a woman able to hear that about herself rather than only about other people.

So take this in the room where the case sits. You are not being marked, and Psalm 130:3 says that if the Lord kept that kind of record nobody at all would be standing, and the Holy Spirit has never once operated a file on you.

And then comes the turn in the verse, and it is one word: But.

But there is forgiveness with thee. Not with the reader. Not somewhere in the reader's effort, or her thoroughness, or her willingness to be hard on herself. With thee. It is located in God, held by Him, dispensed from where He is.

The written word puts the record and the forgiveness in the same pair of hands, and they were never your hands, and the Spirit of God has been trying to get the file off you since the beginning.