The Week in Her Own Handwriting

The notebook was a present and it only has room for one line a day, which is why she has kept it up when she has kept up nothing else.

It is Sunday, late, and she is at the kitchen table with the last of the tea and the rain doing its soft steady thing on the flat roof of the extension. She writes Sunday. Then, because there is a whole week sitting above it, she turns back seven pages and reads.

Monday: worked late again, ate standing up at the counter.

Tuesday: two hours on the phone in bed. Did not mean to.

Wednesday: meant to ring my brother. Did not ring my brother.

Thursday: four episodes. Good ones though.

Friday: fell asleep on the sofa before nine, woke at one, went to bed properly.

Saturday: the big shop, the laundry, and half an hour by the window watching the gulls go over, which was the best part of the week.

She reads it twice. There is nothing terrible in it. That is not what makes her put the pen down. What makes her put the pen down is that this is the real shape of the thing, in her own handwriting, undramatic and completely honest, and there is nobody to blame it on and nothing in it worth defending.

And under that, quiet, the thought she likes least: God read the whole week as it was happening. Not the summary. The Tuesday.

She closes the notebook, and then, after a moment, opens it again, because closing it did not do anything.

You have your own version of that notebook, and you could tell me exactly where your week goes if you were ever going to tell anybody.

He was reading it as you wrote it

The thing I want to take off you first is the idea that anything is about to be discovered.

There is a picture people carry without ever inspecting it, and it goes like this: God is at a distance and roughly informed, and coming near means handing over the details, and the handing over is the dangerous part. On that picture, honesty is a disclosure. You bring Him something He did not have, and then you wait.

That is not the arrangement. It never was.

O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.Psalm 139:1-3

Downsitting and uprising. That is a merism, two poles named to mean the whole of it: sitting down and standing up, and therefore everything in between, which is your Tuesday and your Thursday and the half hour by the window watching the gulls. David is not saying God knows the highlights. He is saying there is no hour of the week that was ever outside of it.

You are known all the way through, and the knowing has already happened, and it did not cost you His company. That is not my warm opinion about you, it is written in Psalm 139, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a psalm three thousand years old and lays it down on a kitchen table on a Sunday night with a notebook open on it.

So nothing you say tonight is news. That is the first mercy in this, and it is bigger than it looks. Honesty with God is not disclosure. It is agreement.

Acquainted is a warm word

Look at the last phrase of that psalm again, because everything turns on it. Acquainted with all my ways.

The Hebrew there is the vocabulary of familiarity, the word you would use of somebody who knows the house well enough to find the mugs without asking. It is not the language of an inspection. An inspector is not acquainted with your ways. An inspector is briefed, arrives, forms a view and leaves with the file.

God is acquainted. He knows how you are when you are tired. He knows the difference between the evenings you chose and the evenings that simply happened to you, which is a distinction almost nobody else in your life bothers to make, including you.

You are met where you actually live, and being met is not the same thing as being assessed. Scripture puts those three verses on the page in the second person to God and never once turns them into a charge sheet, and the Spirit of Christ is the one who makes an old psalm feel like a hand on the shoulder rather than a spotlight.

And now the thing I am not going to do, so you can watch me not do it.

I am not going to tell you what is in your week. I do not know, and it is not mine to name, and a writer who hands a reader a list has quietly changed the room from a kitchen into an office. There is no list here. There is no audit. Nobody is going through your week line by line except the person who wrote it, which is you, and the One who was there for all of it, and He has been kind about it the whole time.

One honest thing, and nothing promised alongside it

Here is where most people get stuck, and it is such a small thing that it is almost funny.

We will not say the true sentence because we think the true sentence obliges us to a second one. I have been living like this, and therefore I promise to stop. The second half is the reason the first half never gets said. The promise is the part nobody is ever sure of delivering, and there is enough respect for God in a person not to hand Him something that cannot be kept, so nothing gets said at all, and the notebook goes back in the drawer.

Take the second half off. It is not required and it was never asked for.

You have the freedom to say one true thing to God tonight with nothing attached to the end of it. It is written that He is acquainted with all your ways, which means He has already priced in what you can and cannot do this week, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the changing anyway, in His own way and at His own pace, which was never your department in the first place.

Say the true thing. Leave the promise unmade. If something changes, it will change because He is at work in you, and He is good at that, and He is not in a hurry.