The Journal That Stops at March

The bag has been in the bottom of the wardrobe since they moved, and she is only in there because the strap on the other one has gone.

The notebook is at the bottom of it, under a packet of tissues and a hair tie and one glove. Blue, hardback, the good kind with the elastic. She bought it in the January sales the year everything was still ordinary, and she remembers being pleased with it.

She sits on the edge of the bed and opens it, and it is worse than she expected, because it is so tidy.

January is full. Little dated entries in her best handwriting, the kind of writing a person does when they have decided to be the sort of person who journals. Thanked God for the parking space at the hospital, which she had prayed about and had felt slightly silly praying about. The word that came in the Sunday meeting. The morning in the second week when she woke at five for no reason and read for an hour and it was like being fed.

February is full too, though the handwriting relaxes.

The fourteenth of March is four lines. It says the scan is Thursday. It says, please.

And then the paper is white.

Not for a page. For a hundred and sixty pages. The whole rest of a good notebook, elastic still holding it shut on nothing, and two years and a bit on the other side of it.

She sits there with it open on her knees, and the thing that goes through her is not grief, it is embarrassment, and then something colder underneath the embarrassment. She thinks: that is what it looks like. There it is. That is the exact week He stopped, drawn on paper by my own hand, and I have been carrying the evidence in a bag under a glove.

Her daughter shouts something up the stairs about the immersion heater.

And on the way down, holding the notebook, she remembers, for no reason at all, that the man over the road put their bins out every Tuesday for about three months that spring. She never asked him. She had two hospital runs a week and a fifteen year old and she genuinely never once put the bins out, and the bins were always out, and she had not thought about it since.

She stands on the third stair from the bottom.

Because the notebook is not blank on account of God going quiet.

The notebook is blank because somewhere around the fourteenth of March she quietly raised the bar for what counted, and nothing since has been big enough to qualify.

What Samuel actually wrote on the stone

There is a stone in 1 Samuel that people put on cards and sing about, and the sentence carved into it is much smaller and much better than the one people remember.

Israel is in trouble. The Philistines are coming up, and the people are frightened enough to beg Samuel not to stop crying out to God on their behalf, which is not the language of a confident nation. Samuel offers a lamb and cries out and God answers, and the day goes their way, and it is genuinely dramatic.

And then Samuel picks up a rock.

Then Samuel took a stone, and set it between Mizpeh and Shen, and called the name of it Ebenezer, saying, Hitherto hath the Lord helped us.1 Samuel 7:12

Hitherto. Up to this point. That is the whole inscription.

Not: the Lord has finished the matter. Not: everything from here is settled. Not even: the Lord has helped us gloriously, though He had. Just, up to here, He has helped us, and a stone put down at the exact place they had got to.

It is the most honest memorial in Scripture, because it is written from the middle. And the material is a rock off the ground, which anybody can lift, put where people walk past it.

Hear that as spoken over you and not merely told about Samuel. You have not been living through an unrecorded stretch. His word is full of people setting down ordinary stones in unfinished situations, and the Holy Spirit has been the keeper of your last two years whether or not a single line of them reached that notebook.

The bar you raised without telling yourself

Now the thing on the third stair, because that is the real subject of this message.

Before March, an entry could be a parking space. A parking space went in, in best handwriting, with a bit of embarrassment attached, and it went in anyway.

After March, without ever deciding it, the standard changed. A thing had to be proportionate to what was happening. It had to answer the scan. Anything smaller than the trouble felt insulting to write down, like offering somebody a boiled sweet at a funeral, so the small things kept arriving and none of them got in.

The bins for eleven Tuesdays. The appointment that moved to the only afternoon in the week that worked. The woman at work who covered without being asked and then never referred to it again. The night you did not think you would sleep and did. The bus that waited.

None of those were big enough to qualify under the new rule, and the new rule is the only reason the pages are white.

Right now, as you read this, you are inside a stretch of God's help that has never been written down, and that is a record-keeping fact and not a spiritual one. What is written says His mercies are new every morning, and the Spirit of God has been dispensing them at exactly the size that fits through a door of a hard week, which is small.

Small is not a lesser kind

And I want to guard something here, because this is the place a message like this usually goes wrong and starts asking people to feel grateful.

I am not telling you to count your blessings, and I am not going to pretend the bins are the same size as the scan. They are not. Nothing in this is a trade.

What I am saying is that the size of a thing has never been what makes it evidence. Samuel's stone was a stone. The manna was flakes. The widow's oil was a jar she already had in the house. God has an established habit of leaving small ordinary objects behind Him as receipts, and it is the receipt that matters, not the denomination on it.

So a dated line about a neighbor and a wheelie bin is a stone between Mizpeh and Shen. It is not a consolation prize for people who did not get a miracle. It is the same category of thing, written from the middle, which is where you are standing.

You have a stone to set down tonight, and it is already yours, and you do not have to manufacture it. It is written that He helped us hitherto, and His Spirit is the One turning your own two years back over so you can read what was on the underside of them.