The Notebook I Keep on Sundays

The notebook lives in the drawer under the tea towels, which is where a person puts a thing she has decided is not a big deal.

Sunday, about nine. The washing is on. She takes it out, writes the date, and gives herself one line. Just one. She has rules about this, and the rules are that the line has to be honest and the line has to be short, because a long entry would mean she was arguing with herself, and she is not arguing with herself, she is keeping a record.

Fourth of February. Same.

Eleventh of February. Nothing. Slept badly.

Eighteenth of February. Lunch with S. Laughed twice. No actual difference.

Twenty fifth of February. Same.

There are fifty one of these. She counted, one night, and then wished she had not counted.

Because here is what the notebook is for, though she has never written the reason down anywhere. Two years ago her life came apart in a way that other people found frightening. There were prayers. There was a woman from the church who fasted for her on Thursdays and told her so in a card. There was a night her brother drove ninety miles at two in the morning and did not say a word the whole way back.

And in June they discharged her, and she went home, and she is exactly the same person.

Same short fuse in traffic. Same lurch when the phone rings from an unknown number. Same habit of reading the ends of books first. She had assumed, without ever once putting it in a sentence, that something that big would leave a mark on her that she could find. That she would come out kinder. Steadier. Something.

She has been looking for the mark every Sunday for a year, and the notebook says what the notebook says.

On the last page, in a different pen, in March, she wrote seven words she has not looked at since.

I think it was wasted on me.

That is you, is it not.

Maybe you do not keep a notebook. Maybe it is a thought you have at traffic lights, or the reason you have gone quiet in the group that prayed for you, because they want to hear how you have grown and you have got nothing to give them. And underneath it is the sentence you would never say at a table: all of that, and it landed on me, and I did not take.

Nothing you can inspect is the record

I am not going to tell you that you've changed more than you think. You would check that against your own evidence within about four seconds, and you would be right to.

Let me go somewhere better than reassurance.

You would want the reference before you accept a sentence like this, and that instinct of yours is a good one, so here it is. Job 14, verse seven. Job is in the worst stretch of his life, and he reaches for a tree, and what he says about it is the strangest hope in the book. You have not been abandoned to a stump, and you have not been quietly written off as the one it did not take with. That is Job's own written word about how life works when nothing shows, and the Spirit is the one holding it up against a drawer under the tea towels.

For there is hope for a tree: if it is cut down, it will sprout again, and its shoots will not cease. Though its root grows old in the soil, and its stump dies in the dust, at the scent of water it will bud and put forth branches like a young plant.Job 14:7-9

Now notice what Job does not say, because this is where a message like this normally goes wrong and I am not taking you there.

He does not say the tree gained anything by being cut. He does not say the cutting was a good idea, or a training exercise, or that the tree came back better for it. There is no explanation offered for the axe anywhere in that verse. Job simply stands in front of a stump and says the life did not end where the visible part ended, and that is all he says, and he was not consoled by it, he was arguing with God when he said it.

I want to leave the axe exactly where Job left it. What happened to you was not a lesson. It was not sent to make you kinder, and nothing in you failed to learn something it was supposed to learn. If a sentence anywhere in this message starts to sound like your two years had a purpose it was meant to deliver, put that sentence out of the house, because I am not going to be the one who hands you that.

Here is what I will say. That written line about the root is older than every hospital in the country you live in, and the Spirit has not retired it. You were never a plot of ground that owes somebody a harvest for the water that went into it. You have been marking yourself against a yield nobody but you ever demanded.

And the root, in Job's picture, is doing something specific: nothing you could photograph. It grows old in the soil. The stump dies in the dust. From above there is no argument to be made for that tree at all, and the argument is not the point, because the tree is not being assessed. It is being kept.

You have been the assessor and the assessed for fifty one weeks, which is an exhausting way to run a Sunday. The written word puts the record somewhere else entirely, and the Holy Spirit is not sitting beside you with a second notebook and a harsher pen. He is nearer than that and much less interested in your marks.

And I will not put a date on anything. Nobody can tell you when a bud shows, and the people who try are guessing. Job does not say next spring. He says at the scent of water, which is not a schedule, and the not-knowing is not your failure to plan properly.