The Log With One Column Missing

The kitchen light is off, because at this hour he does not need it. The window over the sink faces east down the channel, and the sun comes up the water and lays itself flat across the table where the book is open, and that is light enough to write by.

The book was his father's. Hard green covers gone soft at the corners, and inside, columns ruled by hand with a steel rule and a biro the year the new harbor wall went in: date, tide, wind, ground, bait, weight. Six columns, forty-one years of them in his father's small square hand, and then a page where the writing changes and becomes his own, and another twenty-six years after that.

He keeps it to the day. He has kept it to the day through two boats, one bad shoulder that has never come right since the winch, and a stretch of years in the middle he does not talk about. Wind northeast four. Neap. Twelve stone of pollack off the Hen and Chickens. He can tell you what the water did on any morning since he was nineteen years old, and if you doubt him he will fetch the book down and show you, because he does not remember it. The book remembers it. That is what the book is for.

And here is the thing he has never once noticed until this morning, and he only notices it because his grandson asked him a question at tea yesterday that he could not answer.

His father ruled seven columns. Seven. There is a seventh line down the right hand side of every page, faint now, drawn on the same afternoon as the other six, and it carries no heading, and in sixty-seven years of that book nobody has written a single word in it. It is about four words wide. His father left it and never filled it. He inherited it and never filled it. The boat has been sold and rebought twice and that column has stayed as clean as the day it was ruled.

The boy had asked him, over the beans, Grandad, has God ever done anything for you.

Just like that. And he had said something. He genuinely cannot remember what he said, only the shape of it, something about how the Lord looks after them that go to sea, and the boy had accepted it and gone back to his plate, and it had sat in the old man all night like a swallowed stone.

Because he could have answered a question about the tide on any morning of his life, to the hour, with the book open at the page. And on the only question the child actually asked him, he had a warm sentence and nothing at all behind it. Sixty-seven years of weather, recorded and dated and kept. And the column that would have held the other thing, ruled and waiting since before he was born, empty the whole way down.

You keep a log too. It may not have covers, but you know what you can produce on demand and what you cannot, and if you are honest at this hour you know exactly which column of yours has never had a word in it.

Forget not, said the man to himself

Psalm 103 opens with a man giving himself an instruction, and I want you to notice who he is speaking to, because it is not a congregation.

Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.Psalm 103:2

David is talking to David. Not to Israel, not to the young men, not to somebody who has drifted off and needs bringing back. He turns and speaks to his own insides, and the thing he tells them is not believe harder and it is not serve better. It is this: do not lose the list.

Look at what that assumes. It assumes there is a list, that God has actually done things, itemized things, one at a time, in the life of one particular man with a particular name. And it assumes that a man who watched those things happen will let them slide out of his hands unless something makes him look. Forgetting is not the failure of a careless person. It is what happens to anyone with a boat to run and a family to feed and weather coming.

So the command is a kindness and not a scolding, and right now, as you read, it is being spoken over you rather than at you. Scripture put it in the second person on purpose, and the Holy Spirit, the one Jesus said would bring His words back to a person's remembrance, has been holding on to everything you set down and could not find again.

The six columns and the seventh

Notice what the six columns in that green book are. Every one of them records a condition. Wind, tide, ground, bait: those are the things that happened to him, the state of the water on a given morning, the circumstances he went out into. Sixty-seven years of conditions, and a man who can recite them.

The seventh column, the blank one, is the only one that would have recorded a doing. Not what the sea was like. What God did. And it is worth saying plainly, because this is the wound and I am not going to walk past it: a life recorded entirely in conditions will eventually convince the man living it that conditions are all there ever were.

That is the real reason he had nothing for the boy. Not unbelief. Bookkeeping. He had believed the whole time and written none of it down.

You are not a man who lost his record. Nothing has been lost, and the difference is the whole hinge of this morning: a lost thing has to be found again, and an unwritten thing only ever has to be written. Psalm 103 goes straight on to name what belongs on that page, forgiving, healing, redeeming, crowning with lovingkindness, and the Spirit of God who moved on David to write it is the same Spirit at work in you while you sit there with your tea going cold.

He asked His own people to keep a column

This is not a technique somebody thought up. God Himself has always been the one insisting that His people write it down and say it back.

He told a whole nation to remember the road they came by, every mile of the forty years, so that the road would still be teaching them long after their feet were off it (Deuteronomy 8:2). And on the last night, in an upstairs room, the Lord Jesus put bread into the hands of His friends and gave them a thing to keep doing, and the reason He gave was remembrance (Luke 22:19). The God who could have left it all to their memory did not leave it to their memory. He gave them a practice, and a date, and something to hold.

You have permission, then, and you have more than permission. You have an instruction with your name on it, because Psalm 103:2 was written in the singular and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that word off the page and across the table to you this morning.