The List on the Workshop Door

Ronnie's workshop is the old stable at the back of a builder's yard, and the inside of the door is covered in pencil.

Measurements, mostly. Two four four zero by twelve twenty. A stair rise worked out three separate times because he did not trust it the first two. A phone number for a man who does glass. That is what the back of a workshop door is for, because a door is what is nearest when your hands are full.

Down the right hand edge, small, in the same handwriting, is something that is not a measurement.

It reads:

Grandad's plane. Hillside Road. Wednesdays. Uncle Ken. Kerry's photographs. Six years.

His apprentice has looked at it twice and assumed it is a cut list.

Beside four of the six there is a tick.

The tick is the whole thing, and Ronnie has never once said out loud what it means. It means that one was mine. Not just something that happened. That one was the bill.

The plane was his grandad's, wooden, beech, worn to a shine at the front where a thumb goes. He let it go in the second year. Tick.

Hillside Road was the flat, and he lost it. Tick.

Wednesdays was five a side on a floodlit pitch, and they stopped ringing, and he honestly cannot work out to this day whether they stopped ringing or he stopped answering, so that line carries no tick and it has bothered him for years that it does not.

Uncle Ken died and nobody told Ronnie until the Sunday after the funeral. Tick.

Kerry's photographs are his sister's wedding. He was there. He is not in one of them. No tick on that line either, and that one is worse, because a loss with no tick beside it has nowhere at all to go.

Six years. Tick. He has never written anything underneath it.

He is nine years the other side of those six now. Nine. He has his trade back, a van that starts, a woman at the shop who saves him the good rolls on a Friday. And once a month or so, at the end of a day, he stands in front of that door with a mug going cold in his hand and reads the column from the top like a man checking a total.

He would tell you he has made his peace with it. What he is actually doing is sorting. He is going through six things and deciding, one more time, which of them were the punishment.

And here is where I stop talking about Ronnie.

Because you keep a list too. Yours is not in pencil on a door, and it does not need to be, because you have never once had to go and look it up. You know the order it comes in. You know exactly which lines carry the tick.

And the tick means the same thing on your list as it does on his.

There is another record

Your list is not the only record of those years. There is an older one, kept somewhere else entirely, and what is written in it is nothing like what you think.

You have kept count of my wanderings; put my tears in Your bottle. Are they not in Your record?Psalm 56:8

The bottle in Psalm 56 is a small leather flask, the kind a man carried on his hip on a long road and did not put down for anything. So this is not a filing cabinet in an office somewhere with your name printed on the spine. You are being carried, and what is being carried along with you is the crying you did in the worst of it, and the Holy Spirit has kept it that close for that long.

Read the first line again, because it is the one nobody expects. You have kept count of my wanderings. Wandering is the exact word for those years, and God did not look away from a single one of them, and He did not file them under offenses either. He counted them the way a man counts something he is keeping track of because it belongs to him.

Now, the ticks.

Psalm 130:3 asks a question and then declines to answer it, because the answer is obvious and the psalm is too kind to say it out loud. If the Lord kept a record of wrongs, who could stand? Nobody. Not one person in the history of the world. And you are standing. You are upright, reading this, nine years or three years or eleven years down the road from the worst of it, and the Spirit is holding your own two feet up in front of you as the evidence that no such record is being kept against you.

Nobody can tell you which of those six things happened for which reason. I cannot. You cannot, and you have been trying to for years, in front of a door, with a mug going cold. What I can tell you is what those losses are not, and then I am going to stop, because Scripture stops there and the Holy Spirit does not fill that silence in with a theory.

They were not a sentence handed down. They were not God settling up. They were not discipline, they were not correction, they were not a refining, and there was no lesson stitched into the lining of any of them. I am not going to tell you what they were for. Nobody gave me that to hand out, and a man who fills that gap in order to make a page feel finished is making it up.

There is a difference between a thing that happened and a sentence that was passed, and your whole list lives in the gap between the two. A sentence needs a judge. It needs somebody who wanted you to carry it. Read the six lines on that door and find me the judge. There is not one, and the only person who has ever sat in that chair is you, on your own, in a workshop, with a pencil.

I have no standing to lift a single tick off that door. Romans 8:1 has, and it does it without mentioning the door at all: there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Now. Not pending, not under review, not once the arithmetic is finished. You are in Christ Jesus, and His Spirit is the one who keeps that word standing in the present tense over a man who still believes he is owing.

Somebody told you at some point, probably gently and probably meaning it well, that you had to face what it cost. Psalm 103:10 says something about the God you are actually dealing with, and it reaches for an accounting word on purpose: He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our crookedness. Repay. He has looked at the ledger, and He has declined to use it, and the Holy Spirit has been saying that over your six lines since long before you started writing them.