A Thing He Watched

Manu carries one thing and he has carried it for about eleven years.

I am not going to make it up for you. It is not the same as yours, and it is not a crime, and if he told you the whole of it you might not think it was the worst thing you had ever heard, and none of that helps him at all, because he was there and you were not.

Two people know a version of it. Nobody knows all of it.

He is a good man now and he was mostly a good man then, which is the part he cannot make fit.

Here is what he actually believes, though he has never put it in these words.

He believes God chose a version of him.

Not deliberately deceived, exactly. He is not conscious of hiding. It is more that he has an idea of a file with his name on it, and the file contains the man everybody sees, and somewhere there is a page that is not in it. And if that page ever went into the file, the decision would be reviewed.

That is why he is careful. That is why he cannot rest.

It is not that he thinks he would be thrown out for it. It is that he has never once let himself find out.

He walks at first light. Most days, out to the rocks with a flask, and he sits.

And on a morning in the winter, with the water completely flat and gold all the way out, something arrived in him and it was not comfortable.

He thought: He was there.

Not: God found out afterward. Not: God read about it. God was in the room while it was happening, at the time, watching, with nothing hidden from Him and nothing softened.

And Manu had never once thought about it that way, in eleven years, and he sat on those rocks with the flask going cold and understood that he had been afraid of God discovering something God had watched.

Now let me ask you what you think He does not know yet.

Because if this is yours you have a page, and you have some idea of what happens when it goes in, and the entire structure of your life with God has been quietly built around that page staying out.

He was not working from a summary

David writes a psalm about being known and it goes further than most people are comfortable with.

My frame was not hidden from You when I was made in secret, and skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth. Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; and in Your book were all written the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there was not one of them.Psalm 139:15 to 16

Take the last line first.

In Your book were all written the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there was not one of them.

All the days. Written. Before there was one of them.

That is not a verse about God being clever. It is a verse about what God had in front of Him when He decided about you. Every day, including the one you cannot say out loud, was already written down when the decision was made.

He was not working from a summary. He was not choosing a version. He had the unedited thing, all of it, in full, before you had lived a single day of it.

And Your eyes have seen my unformed substance. Before there was anything of you to see, He was looking.

So hear this said over you, on a cold rock with a flask going cold in your hand. You have been afraid of God finding out something God was present for, and the choosing was made with the whole of it already in front of Him. That is written into a psalm about being known before you existed, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the seal on you, and He was not put there on the strength of an incomplete file.

Now let me be careful, because there is a cheap version of this and it would be no use to you.

I am not saying the thing did not matter.

It did. You know exactly what it cost and who it cost, and a God who shrugged at it would be a God who does not take you seriously as a person who acts, and that God is no comfort to anybody who has actually done something.

It went somewhere. That is what the cross is: not a shrug, but the place where the weight was actually carried by somebody. Nothing about your page was waved away. It was paid.

And if there is a person still owed something in this, that is a real and separate piece of work and it is worth getting somebody wise to help you think about it. This article is not a replacement for that and I am not going to pretend it is.

But here is what has been happening in you for eleven years, and it is a lie about the mechanics.

You have been living as though God's choosing was a decision made on the basis of information, which could therefore be revised by better information.

It was not. Read the psalm again: the days were written before there was one of them. There is no new information about you anywhere in this universe. There is nothing that can arrive at God's desk. The category of finding out does not apply to Him, and every hour you have spent managing what He might discover has been spent on a fear that has no mechanism behind it.

And notice what that fear has cost you. Not peace, though it has cost you that. It has cost you the ability to be in the room. You cannot rest with somebody you believe is holding an incomplete file on you, and so for eleven years you have been near God rather than with Him, and everybody who knows you slightly thinks you are fine.

The word says where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, which is Paul writing about the worst-case direction on purpose. And the Spirit of God is called the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry Abba, Father, and adoption in that world was legally irreversible in a way that natural sonship was not, which is exactly why Paul used the word.

This tradition has always put the ground outside a person: what God decided, what Christ did, what is finished. And the reason is precisely this. If the ground were in you, then a page could move it. It is not, and it cannot.