The Back Door I Painted in June

The back door had been peeling since well before any of it started. Two winters of it, the old paint lifting off the bottom panel in long curls that came away in your hand if you leaned on the wood while you were getting the key out.

Marion painted it in June.

She could not tell you why that Tuesday rather than any of the others. She went into the hardware shop for a lightbulb and came out with a tin of blue paint, a brush and a sheet of sandpaper, and she did the bottom panel that afternoon and the rest of it the day after.

Half the tin is still in the shed with a strip of masking tape round the lid.

Since then, people have kept mentioning it. Her sister came for lunch, stood in the kitchen doorway with her coat still on, and said look at you. The woman from two doors down said Marion, you have got your color back. Somebody at church said something about seeing her out in the garden again. Three of them inside a fortnight, all saying a version of the same thing, all of them meaning it kindly.

And Marion stands at the sink and looks at the blue door and feels absolutely nothing about it.

Not proud of it. Not moved by it. Nothing. She checks the inside of herself the way a person checks a coat pocket for keys, and the pocket is empty, and it has been empty for a good while now.

So one of two things has to be true. Either everybody is being kind, which would mean a whole fortnight of people can see something in her that is not actually there. Or something in her really has changed and she cannot feel one bit of it, which would make her the last person in her own life to know what is going on inside her.

She has not decided which of those is worse.

The book you do not keep

There are only two witnesses in that house, and both of them have been promoted a long way past what they are competent to do.

The first is your own chest. You look in, you find nothing, and you write that down as a finding. The second is everybody else's eyes: the sister in the doorway, the woman two doors down, the person at church with the kind remark. That gets written down as a finding too. The two findings do not agree with each other, so you stand at the sink in the middle of the disagreement, waiting for one of them to win.

Neither of them was ever qualified. That is not a criticism of your feelings, and it is certainly not a criticism of the people who love you. It is that the record of a life is not kept in either place and never has been.

Psalm 139:16 says God's eyes saw the unformed substance, and that in His book all the days were written before there was so much as one of them. Written. Past tense, in a book, in handwriting that is not yours. You are already recorded, and the recording was done before you had a single feeling about anything at all, and the Spirit of God is pressing exactly that into a woman who has spent since June searching her own chest for evidence.

Your eyes saw my unformed substance; and in Your book they were all written, the days that were fashioned for me, when as yet there was not one of them.Psalm 139:16

Look at what God is described as looking at there. The unformed substance. Not the finished article, not the presentable version, not the part of a person that can be photographed or described or complimented in a kitchen doorway. The unformed thing. The stage where there is not yet anything there to do the feeling.

I have no standing whatever to tell you what is happening inside you. I am not in there, and neither is your sister. Psalm 139 has that standing, and His Spirit is the one who carries a written word past the place where a person keeps their own opinions of themselves. You have been seen the entire way through, and that includes the part of you which currently reports nothing back.

Now, the hollow. It is real, and I am not going to explain it away, and I am not going to give it a job. Nothing in this message says the emptiness is secretly productive or that it is doing something useful under the floor. It is a hollow. You know it better than I do.

And I am not going to tell you where the change came from either. That is the sentence everybody reaches for next, and it is the one that will not be written here, because the psalm gives no account of it and every account on offer is worse than the silence. What the psalm gives instead is a book, a keeper, and a set of days written down before the first of them arrived.

The word in that verse is a book, and a book is a thing somebody keeps. The Holy Spirit is not asking you to remember what is in it. He is not asking you to feel what is in it. He is telling you whose handwriting it is in. You have a record, and you are not its author, and you were never meant to be the one reading it back.

That leaves the other witness, and she has to be stood down as gently as the first. Your sister was not lying to you in the doorway. She saw something, and what she saw was real, and it still is not the proof, because a person who needs other people's eyes to know she is alright has only swapped one unreliable instrument for another. The ruler comes out of both hands.

That is not my opinion of your June. It is what the Spirit has been saying over you out of Psalm 139 since before that tin ever came out of the shop bag, and you have been filing it quietly under things that would be lovely if they were true. You are not waiting on verification. The verification was done in a book, by God, before you had lived a day of it.

You have been told your whole life to trust your gut and to listen to the people who love you. What Scripture puts underneath you is colder than either of those and holds a great deal better: the days fashioned for you were written when there was not one of them in existence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old sentence like that land on an ordinary afternoon at a kitchen sink.