The List She Keeps On The Back Of A Receipt

It started as a shopping list and it went the other way, which is how most honest things start.

Now it lives folded in the zip part of her purse, and there are nine things on it, and the writing has got smaller down the page because she kept needing another line.

They are not big things. That is what she would tell you if she ever showed anybody, which she will not.

Kneeling. She cannot kneel in the garden any more, and it turns out that half of what she loved about a garden happened at that height. Carrying two mugs at once. The stairs at her daughter's house, which means she sees them at hers now, which means she has not seen the room the grandchildren sleep in for two years. Sleeping through. Buttons at the back. Her own handwriting, which used to be good. A particular way she used to laugh, which stopped when laughing started to hurt. Driving at night. And the ninth one, which she wrote last winter and has not looked at since.

Fifty-seven years old, at the kitchen table at half past three with the lamp on because the afternoon has gone dark early.

Nobody has ever asked her for that list. There is no place in a life to hand somebody a list like that. If she gave it to her daughter it would frighten her, and if she gave it to the doctor he would look at four of the nine and put them in a letter, and if she said it at church somebody would say something lovely about how she is an inspiration.

So it stays in the purse. Nine true things nobody knows.

If you keep one, you know it is not a complaint. It is a record. And you know you have never read a single line of it out loud.

He has known the whole list the entire time

Weigh it before anything else, and weigh it at its own size, because on this site the honest part comes first and it never gets hurried.

What this costs is not any one of the nine. It is that they do not add up anywhere. Each one on its own is too small to mention, so none of them ever gets mentioned, and the total, which is enormous, has no place to be counted. It costs kneeling, which nobody would think to grieve. It costs a room in a daughter's house you have not stood in for two years. It costs your handwriting, which was yours. It costs a way of laughing. And it costs you a folded piece of paper in a purse that is the only place in the world where the sum is written down.

I am not calling that small and I am not setting 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 nine lines made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, while the lamp is on: if the ninth line, or the dark afternoons, have gone past sadness into thinking your family would have less to carry without you at the table, tell one living person today. Your doctor, your daughter, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks nobody to hold that on their own, and the Holy Spirit has always worked through people who sit down at a kitchen table.

Now, David, and it is a short line and I want you to notice one word in it.

I will be glad and rejoice in thy mercy: for thou hast considered my trouble; thou hast known my soul in adversities.Psalm 31:7

Known my soul in adversities.

Not known about my adversities. Not been informed of them. He says God knows his soul in them, which is a different piece of work altogether. The trouble is the room. The soul is what is in the room. And what David says is that God has been in there with the interior of him, in the middle of the thing, not standing at the door being told the details.

You are known on the inside of it rather than briefed about the outside of it. Psalm 31:7 says He has known your soul in adversities, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a psalm written in a bad year and lays it on a folded piece of paper in a purse.

And look at the other verb, because it does the quiet work. Thou hast considered my trouble. Considered. To look at with attention, to take account of, to weigh. It is not a glance. It is what a person does with something they intend to take seriously, and it is done to the trouble itself, not to a summary of it.

The nine things have been considered. Not four of the nine, which is what a letter would carry. Not the presentable ones. The kneeling, and the two mugs, and the way you used to laugh.

You have every line of it already read by somebody who did not need it made into a manageable four. That is written in Psalm 31:7, and His Spirit is the one who makes considered mean weighed rather than noticed.

Now let me be honest about what this does not say, because you have had a lot of lovely sentences from people who meant every word.

It does not say any of the nine is coming back. It makes no promise about the stairs at your daughter's house or your handwriting or the winter, and I will not make one, because what God does with your body is His, in His own way, and anybody who predicts it confidently is guessing in a kind voice.

And it does not compare you. There is no line in that psalm that measures David's adversities against somebody else's. On this site there is no such measurement either, and there never will be, and if you have been quietly running one against your own list, you can stop, because the record God keeps has no column for it.

You were considered exactly, at the size the list actually is, and no line of it was ever set beside anybody's. Scripture says He has considered your trouble and known your soul in it, and the same Spirit who searches all things is the one who has been reading the small handwriting the whole time.