The Column I Never Drew

Frances had kept the same kind of notebook since she was nineteen. Small, spiral bound, the kind you buy at a drugstore for a dollar and change. She called it, privately and never out loud, her owed book.

Nothing to do with money. It was worse than money.

November, the call to Dad I did not make, and then he was in the hospital. March, told Ruthie I would pray for her every day and prayed twice. The summer I stopped going. The thing I said to my mom in her own kitchen. Dated, worded plainly, no excuses attached, because Frances did not believe in excuses.

There were twenty-two of those notebooks in a shoebox on the closet shelf, and she was not ashamed of them. A woman who keeps a list like that is at least taking it seriously. That is what she would have told you if you had asked, and she would have half believed it.

It was raining the afternoon Nell came by. Rain running down the old glass in the cottage window in long streaks so the yard looked like it was underwater, and Frances at the table with the notebook open and the pen in her hand.

Nell asked what she was writing.

Frances told her. Not all of it. Enough.

And Nell did a thing Frances did not expect. She did not argue and she did not comfort her. She reached across, turned the notebook sideways so it sat landscape between them, and put one finger down the middle of the open page.

"Frannie," she said. "There is a whole other side of this page. You have never written on it."

Frances said the right hand side was for the list continued, when the left ran out.

Nell said, "Write me one thing God said He would do. His words. Not what you think He is like. What He said."

And Frances sat there.

Thirty-one years of church. Choir, nursery, three funerals she had helped cook for. She could have gone through the left hand column while peeling potatoes. She sat with the pen over the blank right hand side of a dollar notebook and could not produce one sentence.

Nell got up and took the Bible off the shelf by the stove, found a page, laid it flat, and said, "That one. Copy it. His words, not mine."

Frances wrote it small, at the very top of the right hand side, in the careful handwriting people use when they are not sure they are allowed.

And while she was writing, the rain thinned out and the sun came through the streaked glass all at once and lay across the table and across both their hands, the way it does, without asking anybody.

And you have a notebook like that.

Maybe not spiral bound. Maybe it lives in your head and gets read at three in the morning. But you have a column, and it is only one column, and you have kept it faithfully for years.

One column is not a covenant

I want to say the gentle thing first, because it is true and it usually gets skipped.

The list is not a sin. Frances is not a bad woman for keeping it. Every entry in it came out of caring, and a person who never noticed what she owed anybody would be a colder thing than Frances has ever been. So nobody is taking the notebook away from you here.

So let me hand you the thing all that caring has never once been credited with. You have been kept by the very faithfulness you have spent twenty-two notebooks trying to deserve, and I am not saying that to be kind: Ephesians 1:13 calls the Holy Spirit the seal on what God promised, which makes Him the countersignature on this document and not an auditor of your handwriting.

The trouble is not the column. The trouble is that there is one.

A covenant with a single column is not a covenant. It is an account of yourself, kept alone, in a closet, by a woman who has never once been shown the other party's signature. And that is exhausting in a way that looks from the outside like devotion.

So here is the ground, plainly, and it belongs in the middle of the teaching rather than at the end. One half of this is God's own commitment, and that half is settled, sworn, and finished. The other half is your response, and it is real, and it is genuinely asked of you, and it is not the half holding the arrangement together. Both of those sentences are true at once and neither one weakens the other.

Right now, as you read, there is a second column in your covenant that was filled in long before you were born, and it is not blank and it is not vague. Psalm 89:33 has God saying it in the first person, and the Holy Spirit is what takes a sentence written in a psalm and puts it in a woman's own handwriting at her own table.

But I will not remove from him my steadfast love or be false to my faithfulness.Psalm 89:33

Read what He was talking about when He said it

That verse sits inside a promise, and one verse earlier God has just said what He does about failure. He says He will visit their transgression with the rod. He does not pretend nothing happened. He does not wave it off.

And then, without a breath in between: but I will not remove from him my steadfast love.

That is the shape of the sentence and the shape is the whole thing. He names the failure and He refuses to let the failure touch His commitment, in the same paragraph, in His own voice. He is not being sentimental. He is being legal, and He is being legal on your side.

You have a commitment standing over you that God worded specifically so it could survive your worst entry. That is not my reading of His character; His character is exactly what the left hand column has never been able to trust. It is His written sentence, and His Spirit is the one who makes a written sentence feel like it is being said in the room.

Three sentences in the first person

Frances could not name one. So let me put three in your hand, because this is the category where a general sense that God is good has already been tried and has not held.

Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.Isaiah 41:10

Three I wills in one verse and not one if you among them. Strengthen, help, uphold. Notice that the third one is a hand, and notice whose hand it is.

So write that one down on the right hand side before you go any further. You are upheld by a named hand, and it is His righteous right hand and not your own steady one, and I am not the one saying so: Isaiah 41:10 is where God volunteered three verbs in a row, and the Holy Spirit does not carry a sentence into a room in order to take it back out again.

And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.Ezekiel 36:26

He is the surgeon and He is the anesthetist and He is the one who says when. Nothing in that verse is asked of the patient except to be the patient.

You were given a heart of flesh by the God who said He would give it, and you did not perform the operation on yourself. Ezekiel 36:26 is where He put His name to that, and the Spirit He mentions in the very next verse is the one carrying it out inside you now.

And your column is real too

Now the left hand side, because I am not going to quietly delete it while your back is turned. That would be a kindness with nothing in it.

Something is asked of you. Walk with Him. Keep His word. Answer when His Spirit speaks. Go back to the person you were short with. Those are terms and they are real, and Frances was not wrong that they matter.

What she was wrong about is what kind of thing they are. They are not installments. Nothing on the left hand side buys, renews or protects what is written on the right, because the right hand column was settled by an oath and an oath is not a thing you keep topping up.

Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.Philippians 2:12 and 13

You have His own energy inside your obedience, according to Philippians 2:13, which means even the column you keep is being kept by His Spirit working underneath your hand. That is why this is a covenant and not an account.