The Notebook In The Bin

It is in there with the coffee grounds and Ruth is not getting it out.

She threw it in at about half past five, which is early even for her, and she did it fast, the way you do a thing you have talked yourself into. Then she put the lid down. Then she stood there.

It was a plain notebook. Ninety-nine cents, the kind with the cardboard cover that curls. She had been keeping it since the second week of January, and it was not a journal, because Ruth is not a journal sort of woman. It was a record. One line a day, the date and one line, and most of the lines said nothing at all.

Rain. Went to Dorothy's. Good day.

Cold. Tired. Good day.

That was the whole system. Good day, good day, good day, in her handwriting, one line under another, running down page after page like a fence going across a field.

And last night was not a good day, and this morning she could not make herself write the true line, and she could not make herself write a false one, and so she solved it the way you solve a splinter, and now there is a notebook in the trash under wet grounds and she is standing at the counter in her housecoat.

The thing is, she is not upset about last night. Not really. She is upset about January. All those little lines she wrote in good faith, and now she cannot look at them without thinking they were somebody keeping score in a game she was never winning.

What was the use of any of that, then.

And this is where I quit talking about Ruth, because you threw yours out too, whatever yours was. The chip, the app, the calendar on the icebox with the marks on it. And you did it fast so you would not have to argue with yourself about it.

I have lived long enough to tell you what that was. That was not honesty. That was a person taking one night and letting it edit a whole year, and there is nobody with the authority to do that. Not you either.

Somebody else has been keeping the record

Let me set the true thing down first, plain, the way you would set down a hot pan.

You have not lost the record. It was never in that notebook. There is a book being kept about you that has not lost a single line, and nothing you put in the trash this morning is missing from it.

I would not say that out of my own head. It is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it across a kitchen at half past five:

You count my wanderings: put my tears into Your bottle: are they not in Your book?Psalm 56:8

Now sit with what that verse chose to record. Not the good days. The wanderings, and the crying. The verse says God keeps a tally of the times you went off, and it is not a charge sheet, because in the very next breath He is bottling the tears about it. He is not collecting evidence. He is collecting you, the whole of you, the going out and the coming back, and He has been doing it since long before January.

So you have not been keeping score in a game you were losing. You are written down by God, and Scripture is where I get that rather than my own comfort, and His Spirit is not standing at the bin with you sorting the good pages from the bad.

One night does not get to edit a year

Now the thing that made you throw it away, because it is worth naming straight.

It was not last night. It was the way last night went backward. It went back through January and February and all those little one line entries and started calling them false. That is what made the notebook unbearable, and it is the same movement every time: a bad night rewriting a good year and calling it the truth at last.

That is theft, plainly. And here is what is actually so: every ordinary day you lived and wrote down was real, and God saw all of them, and not one has been struck out. What is on you is not a running total, it is Christ, and He did not resign at whatever hour it was.

That is written, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes it something you can stand on in a housecoat instead of something you nod at in church.

And I will say the plain part too, the way a neighbor ought to. Keep every real help you have got. The meeting, the counselor, the doctor, the pills you take at night, the woman who calls on Tuesdays. None of that is competing with God and none of it is weak faith. It is His kindness with a face and a telephone number on it, and He has never once asked anybody to choose between His hand and the hands He sent.