Somebody Was Writing It Down

Your friend brings the shoebox out at the end of the evening.

That is what she does. She has done it before and she will do it again, and the truth is you love her for it. There is a rubber band round the box, the lid stopped fitting years ago, and forty years of somebody else's Christmases are in there out of order, a few of them stuck together.

She holds one up. Look at my father's pants, she says. Look at this one, that is me at six, we had a dog called Bruno for about two weeks.

And you laugh in the right places and you mean it, because the pictures are lovely and her mother is lovely and the dog is genuinely funny.

And then the thing happens in your chest that has been happening for as long as you can remember, and you have never once said it out loud in this kitchen or any other.

You do not have a box.

There is one photograph of you from before you were twelve, and a school took it. Maroon sweater you do not remember owning, mottled blue background, hair done by somebody in a hurry that morning. Nobody in that house took pictures. Nobody wrote in a baby book. There are no dates, no heights marked on a doorframe, no letters kept, nothing in a drawer anywhere in the world with your name on it from those years.

So there is no record.

And here is the conclusion you came to about that, and you came to it so young that it does not feel like a conclusion. It feels like weather. If nobody wrote it down, then it did not happen to anybody who counted. All that calling out. All those nights. That whole stretch of it, and there is not one page anywhere on earth that says it occurred.

Your friend puts the lid back on the box. Sorry, she says. I do this every time.

And you say, no, I love it. And you do.

And you drive home past the turning you never take.

The book nobody ever showed you

Before anything else, two things I am not going to do on this page.

I am not going to ask you what happened. Anybody carrying this has spent a lifetime around people who wanted the details before they would hand over the comfort, and there is no exchange rate on this page. And I am not going to explain the silence. I have no reason for it, nobody is going to be defended in this message, and no sentence here is going to tell you it made you the woman you turned into.

What I am here to say is much smaller and much heavier than either of those.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?Psalm 56:8

Tellest, in that old English, means counts. Numbers. Keeps the tally of. It is the word you would use for coins or sheep or the days of a month, and David uses it for the nights he spent going from place to place with nowhere to be.

Then the tears. Put them in Your bottle. Not wiped, not dismissed, not talked about later when everyone is calmer. Collected. Put somewhere. Kept.

And then the question at the end, which he asks as though the answer is so obvious that asking is nearly a joke. Are they not in Thy book?

You were being written down while nobody in that house was writing anything down at all. Psalm 56:8 says the tears go into His bottle and the record goes into His book, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept both, in an archive that never once needed a photograph to work from.

And notice where David is when he says it. He is not in a good season writing gratefully about a bad one from a safe distance. He is in it, on the move, among people who mean him harm, with nothing kept and no home to keep it in.

You have a book with your name in it that you have never seen. Malachi 3:16 says a book of remembrance was written before Him, and the word puts God on the listening end of it rather than the reporting end, and the same Spirit who carried that sentence into the Scripture carried it here, to a woman driving home from a friend's kitchen.

Now let me say the part that the missing box has been arguing against your whole life.

An unrecorded thing is not an unwitnessed thing. Those are two separate facts and grief has been treating them as one. The absence of a photograph is a fact about a house. It is not a fact about a child, and it is not a ruling on whether the nights counted.

You were never required to file a report to make it real. Psalm 139:16 says the days were written in His book when as yet there was none of them, and the word describes that writing being done with no help whatsoever from anyone in the building, and the Spirit of God has been the keeper of a childhood that nobody in it thought to photograph.