The Name She Took Off The List

The list is in the front of a notebook and it has been going for nine years.

Not a prayer list exactly. She has one of those as well and it is much longer and it changes constantly. This is different. This is things she believes God has said He is going to do, written in her own hand, dated, one line each.

There are fourteen. Three of them have happened and she has written the date beside them, and looking at those three is one of the better things in her life.

Last November she drew a line through number six.

It had not happened. That is the point. She drew a line through it because she could not stand seeing it there any more.

She did it in the evening, with the same pen, and then she sat with the notebook shut in front of her for a while.

Here is what she has not resolved since.

She does not know what she did.

If it was honesty, then she stopped pretending about something and that is healthy and she should feel lighter about it, and she does not.

If it was giving up, then she quietly abandoned something she had been asked to hold, on her own, at a kitchen table, and told nobody.

And she cannot tell which, and it has been sitting in the front of that notebook with a line through it ever since.

If you have crossed something off, come and sit down at this table. Nobody is going to make you write it back in.

The anchor is fastened at the other end

There is an image in Hebrews about hope that is worth taking literally, because the writer chose a very physical thing on purpose.

Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into that within the veil.Hebrews 6:19

An anchor does not work by being held. It works by being attached to something that is not moving, at a distance, in a place the person on the boat cannot see.

And the writer says where the far end is. Within the veil, which is to say inside the holiest place, where Christ has gone in.

So the security in the picture is not in the boat, and it is not in the strength of the person's grip on the rope. It is in what the far end is attached to and where it is attached.

You are held by something fastened at the other end, and your grip was never what made it hold. Hebrews 6:19 puts the anchor inside the veil rather than in the hand of the one hoping, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the earnest of the inheritance in Ephesians 1:14, which means what you did to a line in a notebook did not touch the fastening.

Honesty or giving up is the wrong question

Now let me take the question off you, because it has been carried since November and it does not have an answer.

You have been asking which of two verdicts applies to a woman with a pen, and neither one was ever going to be handed down. Romans 8:1 says there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and it is written in the present tense to people still waiting for everything, and it is the same Spirit named in that chapter as the one bearing witness, which means the verdict you have been bracing for is not coming.

But look at what the passage is doing. It does not assess the person hoping at all. It describes an anchor, where it is fastened, and who went in there ahead of us. The woman at the kitchen table is not being weighed in that sentence and there is no column she goes into.

And notice something else. If the hope were a thing you maintain by writing it down, then crossing it out would matter enormously. If it is an anchor fastened inside the veil, then a line through a notebook is exactly what it looks like: a woman who could not stand the sight of something, doing the only thing available to her at nine in the evening.

You are not under assessment for what you did with a pen, and no verdict is pending. Romans 8:1 says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and it is the Spirit of life named immediately after who made you free, which means the trial you have been running since November has no prosecutor except you.

And I am not going to give you a date, or tell you to write it back in, or suggest that a stronger woman would have left it there. This tradition learned in public what date-setting costs and this site will not sell that back to anybody.

You have been carried through all nine years of that list, and through the November as well. Isaiah 46:4 says I have made and I will bear, and it is His Spirit who does the bearing, which means the woman sitting with a shut notebook in front of her was being held while she sat there.

God is the one holding you, and He was holding you at the moment the line went through it.