The Number Moved the Wrong Way

The letters live in the second drawer down, under the takeaway menus, in the order they arrived.

She could tell you the number off every one of them without looking. She could tell you the date of each and what the weather was doing. There is a small run of them now, five or six, and if you laid them out on the worktop the way she has laid them out on the worktop, more than once, late, with the house asleep, you would see a line, and the line goes the wrong way.

It went the wrong way again this morning.

Not dramatically. That is the thing nobody warns you about. It is not a scene. It is a sheet of paper, and a figure printed in a small box, and the figure is not where it was in the spring, and the room does not change temperature and nobody says anything and the kettle still needs filling.

She rings her sister at eleven.

Says the number out loud. Says it clearly, twice, because her sister is deaf in one ear and because the second saying is somehow for herself. Talks about the appointment. Talks about the parking. Puts the phone down and sits with her hand still flat on it, on the table, the way you do.

And there is a Bible on the shelf in the other room with a verse underlined in blue ballpoint.

She did that underlining in a hotel room, on a work trip, on an ordinary Tuesday when nothing in particular was wrong. It was not a desperate underlining. She had read the psalm and something in it had gone into her like a nail into wood, and she had marked it, and for a good while afterwards she had said it to herself in the car and while she was doing her hair, out loud, without any self-consciousness at all.

She has not said it out loud in three months.

That is what comes to her, sitting at the table with her hand on the phone. Not doubt exactly. She has not stopped believing anything. She could still tell you the reference. But she has been saying the number out loud, several times a week, to her sister and to the woman at work and to herself in the bathroom mirror, and the promise has gone entirely silent and moved inside her head where nothing can hear it.

One of the two true things in her house has a voice. The other one has not made a sound since the spring.

Two true things in one kitchen

Let me say the first thing plainly, because a lot of writing about this subject cheats at exactly this point and I am not going to.

The number is true.

It is not a lie, it is not a trick, it is not the enemy pretending. It is a measurement, taken carefully by people who know how to take it, and it says what it says. Nothing in this message asks you to pretend otherwise, nothing here asks you to look away from it, and nothing here has one word to say against the people looking after you or the appointments in your diary. Go to them. Keep going.

And I am not going to explain it to you either. I am not going to tell you what the number is for, or what God is teaching you through it, or what season it belongs to. Nobody on this page has been given that, and a writer who hands you a reason has invented one.

Here is what I have got, and it is not small: there are two true things in that kitchen and only one of them has been talking.

You are holding a real promise, right now, at this table, and the silence it has fallen into has not aged it by a day. Psalm 119:89 says God's word is settled for ever in heaven, and settled means fixed and finished and already filed, and the Holy Spirit did not put that verse into you three months ago on a Tuesday only to withdraw it when the printing changed.

Settled in heaven, which is not a place the report can reach

Here is the psalm.

For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven. Thy faithfulness is unto all generations: thou hast established the earth, and it abideth.Psalm 119:89-90

Notice where the word is settled. Not in her body. Not on the printout, not in the drawer under the takeaway menus, and not in the line she can see when she lays them out on the worktop. In heaven.

That location is the whole comfort of the verse, and people miss it because it sounds abstract and it is the opposite of abstract. It means the word is settled somewhere the report has no jurisdiction. A figure in a small box can move up and it can move down and it can do that every month for a year, and it does not have the reach to get where God has filed His own word. The report is a real document about a real body. It is not a document about heaven.

And then the psalmist does something very deliberate in verse ninety. He points at the ground. Thou hast established the earth, and it abideth. You want evidence that God's steadiness is not a theory, he says: you are standing on it. You stood on it this morning without checking, and it held, and it has held every morning of your life while every other thing you own has moved.

You are standing on His steadiness at this second, in a kitchen, and it has been holding while you were doing your hair and while you were on the phone and while the number moved. That is what the word says in Psalm 119:90, and the Holy Spirit is the One taking a verse about the ground under your feet and making it press against the drawer in the second row down.

Which one has been getting said out loud

Now I want to be careful, because there is a version of what I am about to say that would harm you, and I am not going to say that version.

I am not telling you that the promise went quiet because you did something wrong. I am not telling you that the silence has cost you anything with God. There is no ledger. Nothing has been withheld from you because a verse stopped being spoken in a car, and if anybody has ever told you that your believing is the mechanism, they told you wrong and you can set it down.

What I am saying is much smaller and much more practical. Whatever gets said out loud, gets the room.

She has been saying the number out loud several times a week for three months, to her sister, at work, in the mirror. The number has been shaping the air in that house because it has had the air to itself. And the promise, which is not less true, has been living silently behind her eyes where it cannot do the one thing spoken words do, which is arrive from outside and land on somebody.

Speaking it is not a technique and it is not a lever. God is not waiting for the volume. It is simply that you were made to receive words from outside yourself, and His word was written to be one of them.

Right now, as you read, the promise you underlined in a hotel room is still standing in the terms it was given in. Scripture says it is settled for ever, and the Holy Spirit is the One who put the nail in the wood the first time and has never taken it out.