The Note in Her Bag

There is a folded piece of paper in the side pocket of her bag and it has been there four years.

It has moved bags twice. That is the detail that tells you the most. When she got the new bag she transferred everything, and she came to the note, and she stood in her bedroom holding it for a moment, and then she put it in the side pocket of the new one because there was nowhere else for it to go.

It is not a nice note. It came from a situation that is over, and it says a set of things about her that were said in a bad season by somebody who is not in her life any more. She does not read it often. Two or three times a year, perhaps, usually at night, usually when something else has gone wrong first.

Here is the thing she has never quite said to herself. That note has no force. Nothing in it is being enforced by anybody. The person who wrote it has moved on. The situation resolved. Even the version of her it describes is four years out of date, and everybody who knows her now would not recognize the woman in it.

It is paper. It is genuinely and simply paper.

And she carries it, at a small constant cost, in a pocket she touches every time she looks for her keys.

Now, she brought the whole matter to God long ago and she is not in doubt about that. What she has not done is empty the pocket, and there is a difference between a matter being settled and a person stopping carrying the paperwork about it.

That is you with your hand in the side pocket.

You brought it. It was dealt with. And you have kept the document, the account, the version of events written in the worst season, and you take it out two or three times a year at night, and it does nothing to you except what an old canceled paper can do to somebody who agrees to read it.

Paul says what was done with the document

Paul writes to a congregation who were being handed a whole system of requirements, and he uses a very concrete legal image, and the concreteness is what makes it useful.

Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross.Colossians 2:14

The handwriting. In the Greek it is cheirographon, which is the specific word for a document written in a person's own hand acknowledging what they owe. Not an accusation somebody else made about you. A statement in your own handwriting, which is far harder to argue with, and which is exactly what your note is.

Now watch the three verbs, because Paul stacks them deliberately.

Blotting out. Erasing the writing so the surface is blank. Took it out of the way. Removed it from the middle, out of the space between the parties. Nailing it to his cross. Publicly, visibly, on a Roman execution stake, where canceled charges were displayed for everyone to read.

That is not quiet forgiveness. That is a document erased, removed, and then posted up in public as void.

You are dealing with a paper that was canceled in three separate motions and then displayed as canceled, and I am not making this easier than it is: Colossians 2:14 lists all three in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying it who can get a hand out of a side pocket it has known for four years.

Let me teach the last part precisely, because it is worth having. When a charge was settled in that world, the nailing up was the announcement. It meant nobody could come back later claiming the matter was live. The public display was the protection.

So the document in your bag is not simply expired. It has been declared void in a way designed to stop anybody, including you, from treating it as current.

You have been carrying a canceled paper as though the carrying kept faith with the truth of what happened, which is written into the passage rather than being my encouragement, with the Spirit of God able to loosen a grip that four years of night reading has strengthened.

And this is where I want to be exact, because doctrine that does not move a body is not much use. Paul does not say the events were unreal. He says the document was canceled. Your history stands. The paper does not. Those are separate objects, and one of them is in your bag.

This has been void since the day it was nailed up, and nothing you have done since has made it any more or less void, because Scripture says blotted out, taken out of the way and nailed to the cross, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that to a woman waiting for a bus.