The List She Would Finish First

The list is not on the refrigerator, because a list on a refrigerator is one you intend somebody else to read. It is in the third notebook from the left, on the kitchen table, underneath a bowl of clementines that nobody has gotten around to eating.

Dana started it at twenty three, on a legal pad, in an apartment with a radiator that knocked all winter. Item one was her temper, which was not really a temper, just a flatness that came down over her face when she was hurt and stayed there for a day and a half. Item two was the way she talks over people when she is nervous. Item three was the running, which she starts every March.

There are eleven items now and four notebooks, because she copies the list forward whenever a notebook fills up, and copying it forward is the closest thing to progress the list has ever seen. Some of the items have moved. The money one used to be higher. The one about her aunt and the phone calls has been item seven for nine years and has never once moved up or down.

She works on them. That is the part that would surprise you. She is not lazy about it and she is not dramatic about it. She has read the books, she has kept the calendar, she went eleven weeks one spring without letting the flatness come down on anybody, and she wrote that in the margin in pencil and then rubbed it out, because eleven weeks is not finished.

Nothing on the list has ever been crossed off. Twenty years, and not one clean line through a single item, because Dana does not cross a thing off until it is done, and she has a very exact idea of done.

Here is what the list is actually for, and she has never said it out loud to anybody, including herself.

It is a gate. It is not a plan of improvement. A plan of improvement gets shorter as you go, and this one has gotten longer every year, and a woman who genuinely meant to finish eleven things would not add a twelfth in March. The list is the reason she never has to find out what happens if she stands in front of God unfinished. As long as there are eleven things, there is a reason, and a reason is easier to hold than a verdict.

Maybe you have never written yours down. Plenty of people carry the list without a notebook and it works exactly the same way. You know what is on it, and you know the order, and you know which item you would name first if somebody asked why you assume there is a better version of you He would have preferred. That list is real and I am not going to argue you out of a single line of it. But look at what was true the whole time you were keeping it. You were loved before the first item was ever written down, and the loving did not wait on the list. It is written in Ephesians 2:4 that God is rich in mercy, and the Holy Spirit has been pressing that word rich on you at the kitchen table for longer than you have wanted to notice.

Look at where the word rich sits in that sentence

Read the verse slowly, because the order of it is doing the whole job.

But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;)Ephesians 2:4-5

Every clause in there stands where somebody put it. The mercy is rich before it is spent. The love is great before it is answered. And then comes the phrase that undoes twenty years of notebooks: even when we were dead in sins. Not after the correction. Not once the trend line started looking promising. In the condition, at the worst of it, with nothing on the ledger going the right direction.

That is the position He moved from. You have mercy spoken over you that was already rich before you were anywhere near ready for it. Ephesians 2:5 puts the loving before the mending and never once reverses them, and the Spirit will not let you read that order backward, however many times you try.

And notice what the verse does not say. It does not say He overlooked anything, or lowered a standard, or decided the eleven items did not matter. Nothing in that sentence is soft on the problem. It is simply that the problem was never what He was waiting on. He was rich in mercy. He had plenty. He was not reading the pencil note in the margin.

The claim is settled. The changing is not canceled.

Now let me be careful, because there is a way to hear all of this that would do you harm, and I am not leaving that door open.

I am not telling you the list is worthless or that wanting to change is a sickness. It is not. The temper is worth working on. The unreturned calls are worth returning when you are able. Some of those eleven items are actual love pointed at actual people, and a message that told you to stop caring about them would be a worse master than the notebook ever was.

Two different things are sitting on that table and they have been fused together so long they look like one thing. One of them is settled and the other one is ongoing, and knowing which is which is the whole freedom here.

Settled: whose you are. That was decided by God, first, on His own initiative, out of a mercy the verse calls rich, while every item was still open. It is already settled that you are His, and nothing left unfinished on that page is what settled it. His word closed the matter in Ephesians 2:4, and His Spirit is what makes you hear it as a sentence about you rather than a nice idea about people in general.

Ongoing: the growing. That does not stop. It changes jobs. It stops being the toll you pay at a gate and becomes the ordinary work of somebody who is already inside the house, which is a completely different thing to do on a Tuesday, and much lighter, and far more likely to actually get done.

The claim was made first. Nothing about you qualified you for it, and that is not an insult, it is the only news in the world that holds up under an unfinished list. If the eleven items were the qualification, then the qualification could run out, and you would be back at this table copying the list into a fifth notebook.