The Apology She Kept Redrafting

The rain has been coming sideways at the window since about four, and Nadine has the small lamp on even though it is only afternoon, and the spiral notebook is open at a fresh page.

At the top of the page, in her own careful handwriting, it says forty-one.

She has been doing this since the second week of March. Not every day. Some weeks not at all, and those are the weeks she thinks about it most. The first one was two lines long and she tore it out, which she regrets now, because she cannot remember what it said and she has an idea it might have been the true one.

Draft nine was too casual. She read it back and heard herself being breezy with God, chatty, the way you are with somebody when you are frightened of them, and she put a line through it.

Draft seventeen was worse. Seventeen was self-pitying all the way down, and she could hear the tilt in it, the small sad music underneath every sentence that was really asking to be told it was not her fault. She crossed that one out so hard the pen went through to the next page.

Draft twenty-six was actually good. Honest, specific, no flourishes. She got to the bottom of it and read it back and realized that what she had produced was an excellent piece of writing about being sorry, and that she had spent the last twenty minutes on the wording of the third sentence, and that there is something obscene about workshopping a confession. Through that one too.

So the notebook sits by the window with forty attempts in it and not one of them said out loud. Not one of them prayed. She has never once got to the end of a draft and simply spoken it, because she is waiting, and if you asked her what for she could tell you exactly: she is waiting for a version good enough to be received. She is not stalling. She is being careful. She would not send a letter like that to a person she respected, and she is not going to hand this one up in the shape it is currently in.

The kettle clicks off in the kitchen and she does not get up. The rain slackens a little. She reads the top of the page. Forty-one. She writes, "Lord, I," and then she stops, because she already knows the next four words are going to be wrong.

You know that notebook. Maybe yours is not paper. Maybe it is the conversation you rehearse in the shower, or the prayer you keep postponing until you have got a stretch of days behind you that you are not embarrassed by, or the church you have been meaning to walk into once you are less of a mess. And underneath every draft is the same working assumption: that there is a standard of arrival, and you have not met it yet, and He is waiting at the far end of it with His arms folded. You are received right now, in the draft you are actually in, because it stands written in 2 Corinthians 5:19 that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself and not counting their trespasses against them, and the Spirit has been reading that back to you over the sound of the rain for weeks.

Who moved first

Look at the grammar of the verse, because Paul put the whole thing in the tense he meant.

To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation.2 Corinthians 5:19

God was in Christ. Reconciling. Not imputing. Every one of those is something God is doing, and there is no clause anywhere in the sentence about the world getting its wording right first. The world is not the subject of a single verb in that line. The world is what is being reconciled to. It is done to us. We are the object.

That is not a technicality. That is the difference between the room you think you are standing in and the room you are actually standing in.

You have been drafting because you believe you are the one initiating contact. You think the letter has to travel from you, up, and be found acceptable, and that the response depends on the quality of what you send. Paul says the movement went the other way, first, before the letter, and it was completed by somebody who was not waiting to see what you would write.

You have been reconciled by an act that was already over before you started the first draft, and Romans 5:8 puts the timing beyond argument by saying that Christ died for us while we were still sinners, and the Spirit does not need a better version of that sentence in order to apply it to you.

And notice what He is described as not doing. Not imputing. Not counting it against them. That is ledger language, and it is being used to say there is no ledger being kept against you. You have been keeping one. You have forty pages of one, indexed by draft number. He is not reading it. He never asked for it.

You are not on trial and there is no ledger open against you, since 2 Corinthians 5:19 says plainly that He is not imputing trespasses, and the Spirit closed that book long before you started numbering the pages in yours.

What is settled, and what is still moving

I want to be careful here, because there is a wrong turn available and it is the one people take.

None of this means that nothing about your life needs to change. It might. Some of what is in that notebook is in there because it belongs in there, and you are not imagining that. Change is not the enemy in this message, and I am not going to hand you a comfort that requires you to pretend you have nothing to put down.

But the two things are not on the same shelf, and the whole of your exhaustion comes from having filed them together.

What is settled is the claim. God said mine over you first, on His own initiative, before there was a corrected version of you to say it over. That part is not moving. It is not a reward at the end of the change and it is not withdrawn while the change is slow.

What is still moving is you, and that is fine, and it happens inside the claim rather than in front of it. Nobody was ever renovated in the parking lot. You get taken in first, and the work goes on indoors, and the door does not swing back and forth depending on the week you have had.

It is already finished on His side, and Colossians 1:22 uses the past tense on purpose when it says He has reconciled you in the body of His flesh to present you holy and unblameable, and the Spirit keeps you standing in that tense while you learn to speak in it.

Nothing about you qualified you for this. Not draft twenty-six, which was genuinely good writing. Not the seriousness with which you take the whole thing, which is real and which He is not scoring. He said it first, over somebody who had done nothing to warrant it, and the reason it holds is precisely that it never rested on the quality of the sending.