The Ledger He Kept on Himself

Curt Nadeau writes in a black composition notebook at the kitchen desk under a lamp with a loose switch, the kind you have to press twice. He writes standing up, most nights, because he is only there a minute.

It is not a journal. He would want that clear. A journal has feelings in it. This is a ledger. Short entries, dated, no elaboration, no explanation offered to anybody including himself.

Mar 4. Snapped at Tara over the garage door. Again. Mar 9. Told Denny the invoice went out Friday. It went out Monday. Mar 22. Did not call Mom. Third Sunday.

He has been keeping it since he was twenty-six. There is a moving box in the hall closet with a strip of masking tape across the top, and inside are nineteen years of these notebooks, all the same brand, all filled front to back, and no other living person has ever opened one.

Here is the part that matters, and Curt himself has never once said it out loud. He reads the last two pages before he prays.

Every night. It is the first thing, and it is not remorse exactly and it is not penance exactly, it is closer to a man reviewing the file before a meeting where he is going to be asked about it. He wants to be honest with God, and this seems like honesty, and in a way it is. But somewhere in nineteen years the reading stopped being preparation and started being qualification. If the last two pages are light, he prays easy and long. If March 9 is on there, he says a short one and goes to bed, because he does not feel he is currently in a position to ask for anything.

What Curt believes, though he would never phrase it this way, is that the whole arrangement is under review. That there is an account somewhere with his name on it and a running total, and that the total is recalculated nightly, and that God's willingness to keep him is a number that goes up on good weeks and down on bad ones. He believes he is currently ahead by a little. He believes he has been behind. He has organized his entire inner life around a document he keeps on himself.

The lamp clicks off twice before it goes out. He puts the pen back in the spiral, closes the cover, and goes upstairs.

You know that notebook. Maybe yours is not paper. Maybe it is a running tape in your head that plays at eleven at night, or a specific year you skip over when you think about your life, or one phone call you did not make in 2009 that you have decided is the reason the line has been quieter since. You are not making the list up. Most of what is on it is accurate, which is exactly why it has such authority over you. But hear the thing you have never separated. You are loved by a God who was not reading the list when He decided. Romans 5:8 fixes the timing of it beyond argument, and the Holy Spirit has been trying to get that timing in front of you for years, usually around eleven at night.

You are reading the wrong document

Let me say two things at once, because separating them is the whole work of this article.

The first thing. God is not indifferent to March 9. He is not casual about the invoice or the garage door or the third Sunday. He is a Father and He cares what you do, and the change you want in yourself is a change He wants more than you do. Keeping a record of where you keep failing is not neurotic. It is how a man actually changes, and if the notebook has helped you tell the truth to yourself, keep it. Nothing here is telling you to stop wanting to be different.

The second thing is that the ledger is not the document that governs whether you are His. It never was. And you have been reading it as though it were.

Two documents, and you have fused them into one, and the fusion is what is exhausting you.

For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.Romans 8:38 and 39

Look at what that list is doing. It is not encouraging. It is exhausting the possibilities. Death, life, angels, powers, the present, the future, height, depth, and then a clause that sweeps up anything the writer might have missed. Any other creature. That last phrase is there so you cannot slip your notebook in through a gap.

You have a standing that no entry on any page has the power to move. The word does not soften that in Romans 8:39. It closes the list, and the Spirit is the witness who signs His name under it in a kitchen at eleven at night.

The claim was made in the middle of the ledger, not at the end of it

Now the timing, because timing is where this gets settled.

But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.Romans 5:8

While. Not after. Not once the pages started running clean. The decisive act of God toward you happened at a point in time when the ledger was open, current, and bad, and He did not wait for a better week to do it.

That is the sentence this whole site stands on, and here is its plain form: the claim was made first, and nothing about you qualified you for it. Not one page. Not the good March you had in 2014. If your record had been the qualifying instrument, the claim would never have been made at all, because the record was in exactly the condition you are afraid it is in now.

And in the ancient world a record like yours was a physical object. A written charge, an itemized list of what a man owed, kept where it could be produced against him.

Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross.Colossians 2:14

Handwriting. Your own hand, in a black composition book. You were claimed at the point where the list was longest, and the list was dealt with rather than consulted. Scripture put a period there in Colossians 2:14, and the Spirit does not reopen sentences God has already closed.

So you may keep changing. Please do. Just stop reading the ledger for the answer to a question it was never able to answer.