The Tally in the Road Atlas

Gerry moved eleven times in fourteen years, and he kept the whole of it inside the front cover of a road atlas.

It was a big spiral bound thing with a cracked spine, and it lived in whichever van he had borrowed that weekend, so it was always to hand at the exact moment a man is honest, which is the hour after the last box goes in and before anybody has found the kettle. He wrote in biro on the inside of the cover. A date. A town. And then, underneath, in a second column he had ruled with the edge of the atlas itself, what had not come with him.

The record player his father gave him, left because there was no room in the car. Four boxes of books, given away in a stairwell. The lad in the flat below who used to knock on Sundays. A cat, rehomed to a woman with a garden. His mother's address book, still missing, presumed put out with the recycling in the second town.

Eleven moves. Thirty one items in the second column.

And beside nine of those thirty one entries, written smaller, in a different pen, there is a single letter.

M.

M for mine. M for that one was me. Gerry put those in later, on separate nights, over about six years, and if you asked him he would tell you the atlas is just an atlas and he only ever kept it for the mileage. But he could recite the nine without opening it, and he could tell you which one he would put a second M beside if the pen were in his hand tonight.

You keep one too.

Yours is not written down anywhere, and in a way that makes it worse, because a list on paper can at least be shut. Yours runs in your head at three in the morning, in the same order every time, ever since the moving years ended and you finally got an address with your own name on the lease. Nine years of sublets and spare rooms and other people's kindness, and everything that fell off the back of that. And you have got the order down so well by now that you know which item is coming next before it arrives.

And you know which one is always last.

It is last because it is the one with the M beside it. The one where you were not simply unlucky, where a person was hurt or a thing was dropped or a door was shut because of something you did or did not do, and the years being hard does not undo it, and you have never once managed to get past that item and back to sleep.

Four years at this address. Four years of the same list.

The book nobody is keeping

I want to be careful here, because this is the place where people get told something untrue in order to be comforted, and it never holds.

So let me say what I am not going to do. I am not going to tell you that the nine years were for something. They were not for something. Nothing in the written word turns a stretch of hard living into a syllabus, and I have no intention of handing you a purpose for it that God never wrote. I am also not going to go through your list and reassign the blame, which would be a kind of lying, and a man knows when he is being handled.

What I am going to do is ask who the list is addressed to.

Because a record is a document with a reader. That is the whole of what a record is. An audit exists because somebody will open it. And the thing about your three o'clock list, the thing that has never once occurred to you in four years of running it, is that it has never had a reader and it has never had an addressee. You have been the clerk, the archive and the court all at once, and there is nobody in the gallery. That is not me being kind about it. It is the question Psalm 130 is about to ask in one line, and the Spirit has been holding that line open in front of you for four years.

Now hear the psalm that says this out loud, because a man wrote it out of the depths and he was not being brave.

If You, Lord, should keep a record of wrongs, O Lord, who could stand? But with You there is forgiveness, so that You may be held in awe.Psalm 130:3-4

Stay on the first line, because it is a question and it expects an answer. If a record of wrongs were kept, who could stand. Not who could stand comfortably. Who could stand at all. The psalm is not saying you would fare badly in the audit. It is saying nobody survives one, not the man who wrote it, not the people who first sang it, not one person who has ever taken a breath, and therefore the audit is not the instrument God is using. You are not the exception who alone has a real column. That is written down, and the Spirit put it in the mouth of a man in the depths so it would be there for a man at three in the morning.

Then the second line arrives and it does something you were not braced for. It does not say: but with You there is leniency. It does not say the wrongs turn out to be smaller than they looked, or that they were all somebody else's after all. It says with You there is forgiveness. The word admits the whole weight of the first line and then puts it somewhere else entirely.

I am not the one who gets to say that over your nine entries. Psalm 130 says it, and His Spirit has been saying it over you for four years while you have been reading a book that nobody else has ever opened. You are not in the dock. There is no dock.

And notice the last clause, which is the strangest one in the psalm. There is forgiveness with You, so that You may be held in awe. Not so that You may be taken lightly. Forgiveness is described here as the thing that makes God frightening in the good sense, the thing that stops a man in his own kitchen. The Holy Spirit is not softening the record. He is telling you who has it, and Psalm 130 says the One who has it has already dealt with it.

What the losses are, and what they are not

Here is the part I will not blur.

The things in your second column are losses. They are not lessons. They are not pruning, and they are not correction, and they are not a bill presented to you by God for the way you handled a bad decade. What is gone is gone and it is allowed to hurt, and grief over a record player and a stairwell and a woman who stopped ringing is honest grief, not self pity.

You were never handed those losses as a sentence. Colossians 2 says the record that stood against us was canceled and set aside, nailed to the cross, and the Spirit is the One pressing that into a man who has kept a private copy for nine years. The canceling was done on the real thing, not on a lenient version of it.

So both of these are true tonight and neither cancels the other. The losses are real, and the ledger is not. You may keep the grief. The column marked M has no reader.