Not One Of Them Is Forgotten

The kitchen window is open because the garden is at its best in the evening and because he likes the sound of somebody else's children two gardens over.

There is a pot of tea on the table and three mugs out, which is optimistic, and in fact one of them will be used.

Sixty-three.

The divorce was four years ago and the diagnosis was two, in that order, and he is careful when he tells the story to put them in that order because otherwise people construct something.

His daughter phones on Sundays and it is genuinely good. He has a friend from work who comes about every six weeks and is coming Thursday. He has a garden that is at its best in the evening. This is not a man with nothing.

And still, most days at about this hour, the sum arrives, and it goes like this.

If I did not turn up on Thursday, he would ring, and then he would drive over. That is real. But after the first month, and the arrangements, and a hard Christmas, the ledger of the world would balance again exactly, and there would be no column anywhere that was permanently short. My daughter would be sad and would not be short. Nothing that runs would stop running.

He does not say it as despair. He says it the way an accountant reads a page.

If you have done that sum, you know it is not about being loved. You know you are loved. It is about whether anything is actually missing.

The verse counts the ones nobody counts

The weight first and whole, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it never gets shortened.

What this costs is not company. You have a daughter on Sundays and a friend on Thursday. It costs the sense of being load-bearing, which is a different thing from being loved and which almost nobody distinguishes until it is gone. It costs four years, and then two years, in that order, which you are careful about. It costs the third mug, which comes out of the cupboard by habit. And it costs you an hour most evenings when a page gets read and it balances.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your four years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, right here, because a man alone at a window deserves it plainly: if that sum has ever gone from an observation to something you want, tell one living person today. Your doctor, your daughter, the friend who is coming Thursday, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks no man to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who show up every six weeks.

Now, Luke 12, and read what is being priced.

Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God? But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows.Luke 12:6-7

Five sparrows for two farthings. That is the smallest coin in circulation, and the deal is a bulk deal, and in Matthew's version the price is two sparrows for one coin, which means the fifth one in Luke is thrown in free.

That is what Jesus is talking about. Not a bird somebody loves. A commodity so cheap that one of them is not even priced.

You are being compared to the item that gets thrown in and not counted. Luke 12:6 puts the sparrow at the exact bottom of the market, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a street scene from a Galilean town and lays it on a kitchen table with three mugs on it.

And then the verb. Not one of them is forgotten before God. He does not say God loves them. He says none of them is forgotten, which is a word about record rather than about feeling, and it is the exact word for what you have been worried about.

Your sum is not about love. You know you are loved. Your sum is about whether anything would be missing, which is a question about accounting, and the verse answers in the language of accounting.

You have never once been the item that balances out of the book. That is written into Luke 12:6, and His Spirit in you is the one who makes a first century price list land at a window in the evening.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because four years of good things have already been said in that kitchen.

It does not tell you that anything would stop running. That is probably true and I am not going to argue with your arithmetic about the world, because your arithmetic about the world is correct. Systems close over. That is what they do.

And it does not promise you anything about your health or your years, and I am not going to predict them, because what God does there is His, in His own way.

What it does is tell you which book the entry is in. Not the one where things balance. The one where nothing is forgotten, which is a different book with a different purpose, and it was kept for birds before it was ever kept for you.

You were never in the ledger you have been reading. Scripture says not one of them is forgotten before God, and the same Spirit who searches all things is the one who carries that into a kitchen at the best hour of the day.