The Marks She Kept

There is a drawer in her kitchen with a notebook in it, and the notebook is not a diary.

It is a list. It goes back about seven years and it is in her own hand, and every entry is short, sometimes four words. A date, and a thing she did or failed to do, written down plainly and without any self pity. She is not dramatic about it. If you read a page you would find nothing lurid; most of the entries would strike a stranger as very small.

She started it, she would tell you, so that she would not become somebody who lets herself off. She had known people who let themselves off. She had watched what it did to them and to the people around them, and she decided quite young that she would not be one of those, and the notebook is what that decision looks like in practice.

She is not tormented. I want to be accurate about her. She is a warm woman and people like being near her, and she is kind to everybody except the woman in the notebook.

Once every month or so she takes it out and reads a few pages.

She would say it keeps her honest. And I want to hold that carefully, because there is real virtue in what she is trying to protect. She is trying not to be careless with her own life. That is a good instinct and I am not going to trample on it.

But watch the effect over seven years. There is now a document in a drawer in her kitchen that constitutes, in its own quiet way, a complete case against her. It is accurate. That is the terrible thing about it. Every line is true. And nobody in the world is keeping a record like that about her except her, and she reads it on purpose, once a month, in order to stay honest.

That is you at the drawer.

You have a version of that notebook. It might not be written down; it might just be a stretch you can recite. And you keep it out of what feels like integrity, and it is accurate, and reading it has never once made you kinder, wiser or more free.

The psalm asks the question your notebook cannot answer

This is a short psalm and there is a question in the middle of it that has been standing unanswered for three thousand years, because the answer is nobody.

If thou, LORD, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared.Psalm 130:3-4

If thou shouldest mark iniquities. Mark, there, is exactly what your notebook does: it means to note, to keep account of, to write down and retain. And the psalmist asks what would happen if God did that, and does not wait for an answer, because there is only one and everybody hearing it knew.

Nobody would stand. Not one person, in any generation, including the person doing the asking.

Which tells you something about the notebook, and I want to say it carefully because it is not an accusation. A record kept accurately is not a neutral thing. Any accurate record of any human being, read back, produces a case that cannot be answered. That is not a fact about you. It is a fact about records.

You are held by a God who has deliberately declined to keep the account, and He declined because He knew what keeping it would do, and I am not being soft where the psalm is not: Psalm 130:3 asks the question in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my sympathy who can open a drawer that seven years of honesty has kept shut.

Now the fourth verse, and this is where it turns. But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared. Look at that reasoning, because it is the opposite of what most people assume. You would expect it to say: there is forgiveness with You, so You may be loved. It says feared, which in this psalm means held in proper awe.

The awe comes from the forgiveness rather than from the marking. A God who kept the record would be feared in a small, flat, useless way, the way a person fears a camera. A God who has forgiveness with Him is feared in the enormous sense: taken utterly seriously, because what He has done is beyond the reach of anything we would have thought of.

You have not been let off, which is what you have always been afraid of, you have been forgiven, which is a heavier thing entirely, which is written into the fourth verse rather than being my kindness to you, with the Spirit of God able to tell those two apart in a woman who has spent seven years guarding against the first.

That is the distinction your notebook was built to protect, and it is safe. Being let off is cheap and it changes nobody. Forgiveness is expensive and it changes everything, and it was never in danger of being confused with carelessness by anyone who had actually received it.

This is yours right now, with the drawer open and the notebook in your hand, because Scripture says there is forgiveness with Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it into a kitchen where a good woman has been reading her own case once a month.