Mairi has not kept a diary since the spring of the year before last, and it was not an accident.
She used to. Fourteen years of them, in a box, one a year, and she was not precious about it: shopping, weather, who came for supper, a bad day, a good one. Ordinary.
Then a spring came, and she stopped, and she has never restarted.
She could not have told you at the time why. She has worked it out since, on the shore path, which is where she works most things out. She stopped because a record makes a thing real in a way that living through it does not. If you write Tuesday down, Tuesday exists. If you do not, Tuesday was just weather that happened to you, and by the following spring it has no edges left at all.
So she has almost two years with no edges.
She knows the shape of them. She is not confused and she is not in denial. She simply has no dates, no sentences, no page anywhere in the world where any of it is written, and that was the entire point.
The strangest part is that nobody noticed. Not one person. She kept going to the same shop and walking the same path and answering the phone the same way. Her friend Ailsa, who notices everything, noticed nothing, because there was nothing to notice: a drift does not have an event in it. That is what makes it a drift.
And there is a thought that arrives on the path about twice a month, and it is not the thought you would expect.
It is not that she got away with it. It is the opposite. It is a small cold thing that says: those two years are gone. Unwitnessed, unrecorded, not counted anywhere. As though they did not happen to anybody, including her.
And this is where I stop writing about Mairi, because there is a stretch of your own life with no edges.
Maybe you stopped writing something down too. Maybe you just stopped telling anybody how it was going, and then the telling was so out of date it would have needed a preamble, so you never did. I am not going to ask you what happened in it. Not once, not in a guess. It is yours and it stays yours.
Somebody was writing it down
I want to hand you a verse that most people have to read twice, because the picture in it is so strange that the mind slides off it the first time.
Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?Psalm 56:8
Tellest, in the older English, means counts. Numbers. Keeps the tally of.
So look at what is actually being said. Somebody kept a count of the wandering. Not the arriving. Not the good years, not the achievements, not the parts that would go in a diary. The wandering itself, the unrecorded stretch, the walking about with no dates on it, was being numbered the whole time by somebody who was there.
And then the second image, which is stranger still. The tears in a bottle. In the ancient world you kept a thing in a small flask when it mattered and there was not much of it. It is the gesture of somebody bending down and catching something that would otherwise soak into the ground and be gone, and putting it somewhere it will keep.
So take this on the shore path where you actually walk. You are not missing from the record, and Psalm 56:8 says your wanderings were told and your tears were kept, and the Holy Spirit is the one making that land in you instead of being a nice line about somebody else.
Notice what the verse does not do. It does not ask David for an account. He is not summarizing anything for God's benefit. He is discovering, in the middle of a hard season, that a record was being kept by somebody who was not asking him to produce one.
That is the difference between being audited and being kept. Scripture puts God in the second position: not a clerk waiting on your statement, but somebody walking beside you writing it down so it would not be lost, and His Spirit is the one who has been carrying that book the whole way.
Here is the turn.
The cold thought on the path is that the two years are gone: unwitnessed, uncounted, wasted, not belonging to anybody. And underneath that thought is a quieter assumption, which is that a thing has to be told to somebody to have happened at all.
Psalm 56:8 undoes both. The wanderings were counted while you were in the middle of them, by the only witness whose record is permanent, and the counting was not conditional on your writing anything down. The Holy Spirit was in the two years with no edges and He was not waiting outside them for you to come out and file a report.
And nothing here asks you to give an account now either. Not to a friend, not to a leader, not to a page, not tonight, not ever as a condition of anything. Where somebody already knows some of it and has been kind, keep them and thank God for them. That was never the gate. There is no gate.
So take this plainly. You are held and accounted for in the years you deliberately left unrecorded, because Psalm 56 says they were told and kept and Christ is in you and you are in Him, and the Holy Spirit is on this path with you now.
Let me say one thing gently before we finish. If the drift has begun to carry a thought that sounds like nobody would notice if I were not here, that is not a thing to walk with alone on a shore in the dark. Tell one person today and tell your doctor. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour, and wherever you are there are people awake right now. Nothing on this page is instead of that, and you are worth the call.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, palm up. The right to be kept was not earned by writing it down and is not lost by leaving it unwritten: it is yours in Christ, given, exercised in His Name. Speak them, stay open handed a moment, and leave the outcome with Him.
- Two years with no edges, you are not missing from anywhere. Psalm 56:8 says thou tellest my wanderings, and the Holy Spirit was inside every one of those days and never once looked away.
- Cold thought that says none of it counted, you are answered. Psalm 56 says the tears went into a bottle and the wanderings went into a book, and in the name of Jesus I stop treating unrecorded as the same word as lost.
- God, You were writing while I was not, and You never asked me for a statement. Psalm 56 says my wanderings are told and my tears are kept, and Your Spirit is walking this path with me today, open handed, with nothing named.
Psalm 56:8
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