The Spiral Notebook

Twenty to six, and the porch light is still on because it is not quite light enough to turn it off, and the coffee is in the mug with the crack in the handle that Hollis has been meaning to throw out for eleven years.

The notebook is on the rail.

It is the third one, technically. The first one fell apart in about 2003 and the second one got left on a roof in the rain, and both times he copied the whole list over by hand into the new one, which took an evening each time and which he has never mentioned to anyone.

The wire is bent. The cardboard cover came off years ago, so the first page is the cover now, and it has a coffee ring on it that is older than his youngest grandchild.

The list starts in 1994.

Ellis, his brother, who does not call. Ellis's boy, who Hollis has met four times. A woman two streets over whose daughter went missing in 1998 and was found and is not all right. A marriage that Hollis prayed over for nine years and which ended anyway, and which he did not cross off, because he did not know what crossing it off would even mean. A job that never came. A diagnosis. Then another diagnosis, twenty years after the first one, different person.

In thirty one years there are two things crossed off.

One of them is crossed off because the man got sober and stayed sober and is a grandfather now, and Hollis still cannot read that line without having to put the mug down.

The other one is crossed off because she died, and Hollis crossed it off with a single line and then sat on this porch for a long time, and it is not a check mark he wanted.

That is the ledger. Thirty one years, three notebooks, one wire bent out of shape, and two lines through anything.

He gets to the bottom of the page.

And then, without deciding anything, without a thought going through his head that anybody could write down, he turns to a fresh page and writes today's date at the top and starts again at Ellis.

You know that turn of the page.

Maybe it is not a notebook. Maybe it is a Tuesday night you keep going to, or a call you keep making, or a table you keep setting, or a room you keep showing up in, and you have been doing it long enough that the doing of it has outlived every feeling that started it. And what has quietly grown up underneath is a question you would not say out loud: whether any of this is actually faithfulness, or whether you have just been unable to stop. You are inside a company that is kept by God, and your part in it has been holding this whole time, including on the mornings you felt nothing at all. That is what Scripture says a kept faith looks like from the inside, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the keeping in a whole people, which is why it does not run on how a man happens to feel at twenty to six.

Paul does not mention the results

Let me put the site's whole subject down in plain words before anything, because it is the frame for all of this.

When Scripture calls anybody the bride, it means the church: a whole people, corporate and plural, a company and not a person. It sits with the words household, body, city, nation and flock. It has never meant a private romance between Christ and one reader, and if that framing ever made you uneasy, keep the instinct. What follows is about a deposit that was handed to a whole people and about one man's share in holding it.

Now hear how Paul sums up his entire life. Not a paragraph. Three clauses.

I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.2 Timothy 4:7

Read it again and notice what is missing.

There is nothing in there about outcomes. Nothing about how many churches held together, and several of them did not. Nothing about the people who left him, and the same letter names them. Nothing about results at all, and Paul had every reason to want a sentence about results, because he was writing that from custody near the end of a life that had not gone smoothly by any measure anybody would use.

Three verbs: fought, finished, kept. Every one of them describes what he did with himself. Not one of them describes what happened as a result.

You are being weighed by a God who counts the running rather than the scoreboard. Scripture says God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, work and labor being the two things named as remembered, and it is the Holy Spirit who bears witness of that to a man who cannot point at one visible result.

And look at the third clause especially, because the third one is the one you need. Kept the faith. The faith there is not his private feeling of confidence. It is the deposit, the trust, the thing handed over to a whole company to be carried. His job was custody. He held what was given to him to hold, and he handed it on, and that is the sentence he chose to end his life with.

You have kept something, and the keeping is the accomplishment rather than the evidence of one. That is written into the verbs Paul chose when he had every reason to choose different ones, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named as the one who guards the deposit in us, which takes the custody off any one man's shoulders.

A dry morning is not a distance

Here is the part I want to be very careful about, because this is where a lot of teaching does damage.

Somebody is going to read a page like this and hear that they should feel more. That if the coffee is cold and the words are flat and the notebook is just a notebook this morning, then something in the relationship has gone wrong and needs attending to.

I am not going to say that, because it is not true and because it makes people manufacture things.

Dry is not distance. Dryness is a weather condition and covenant is a climate, and the whole point of a covenant is that it holds in weather it did not choose. Hollis's flat Tuesday morning is not a lesser prayer than his fervent Tuesday morning in 1994. It might well be the better one, because in 1994 the feeling was carrying him and this morning nothing is carrying him and he turned the page anyway.

You are not further away on a flat morning, and there is no distance in this that you have to close. His word says nothing separates us from the love of God in Christ Jesus and it lists everything it can think of, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes intercession within a person with groanings that cannot be uttered, which means the praying does not stop when the words go thin.

And I am not handing you a regime either. There is no schedule in this article. If you want to know why I will not build you one: a regime turns faithfulness into a performance you can fall behind on, and then the falling behind becomes its own reason to stop, and I have watched that happen to good people for years.

You are free of any program in this, and nothing here is going to keep score on you. Scripture says His mercies are new every morning, every morning meaning the flat ones too, and it is the Holy Spirit who begins a thing again in a man without any ceremony attached to it.