The Discrepancy Is Older Than I Am

Aaron has been trying to make his father's books balance for nine months and they will not.

The business is small. Four vans, eleven people, a yard, and a set of books that were kept properly, by hand, for a very long time by a man who is not available to explain any of it.

Aaron is good at this. That should be said, because he has begun to doubt it. He does this for a living for other people. He can find a transposed pair of digits in a page of figures the way some people can find a wrong note.

And there is a gap.

It is not enormous, and it is not the kind of thing anybody has to worry about, and it is not going to cost anybody their job. It is simply there, and it has been there since long before he was in the building, and every attempt to reconcile it runs backward into a set of decisions taken by a man who is dead and a bookkeeper who retired to another country.

Nine months. Evenings, mostly. He has reconstructed two whole years from bank records to get at it.

His wife found him at the desk at half past eleven again in the March and said, "How far back is it now?"

And he said, "Older than me."

He heard himself say it. That is the thing about that sentence. He had not worked it out until it came out of his own mouth: the original entry that put the whole thing out is older than he is.

And she said, "So it happened before you existed."

And he said yes.

And she said, "And you are going to correct it."

He sat there for a while with the lamp on.

Then he said, "I think I have been trying to audit a man I cannot ask."

Now let me ask you how far back yours goes.

Because there is something you have been trying to reconcile. A family arrangement, a business, a pattern in your household, a way that people in your line have always spoken to each other. And you have been working on it for months or for years, in the evenings, going backward, trying to find the entry that put it out.

And I would guess that the entry is older than you.

Somebody has the complete book

David says something in the most personal psalm in the collection, and it is easy to read it as poetry and miss that it is a claim about records.

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 139:16

In Your book were all written. There is a record, it is complete, and it is kept somewhere other than in your head.

When as yet there was not one of them. The record predates the events. That is the strange and load-bearing part: God's account of your life was not compiled from observations as you went along. It was there before there was a single day in it.

So hear this said over you, at the desk at half past eleven with the lamp on. There is a complete and accurate account of everything you are trying to reconstruct, and it has been kept from before you existed, and you were never appointed the auditor of it. That is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a fact about a book in heaven and lets a man close a book on a desk, which is a different work from agreeing with the fact.

Now let me be precise here, because Zev's kind of reader deserves precision and because this doctrine gets stated badly.

This is not fatalism, and it is not an argument for leaving things unreconciled.

Aaron should finish what can be finished. Some of the gap is findable and he will find it, and finding it is good work, and Scripture has considerable respect for accurate weights and honest books.

And nothing here says God arranged the discrepancy, or that there is a lesson in it that Aaron is failing to extract. Those sentences are not in Psalm 139 and they are not here.

What is here is a distinction, and it is the whole message.

There is a difference between the part of the record you can reconcile and the part you can only inherit.

The reconcilable part is work. Do it, do it well, and stop when it is done.

The inherited part is not a puzzle you have failed to solve. It is a set of entries made by people you cannot question, in circumstances you were not present for, for reasons that went into the ground with them. It cannot be balanced by you, not because you are not clever enough, but because the information required to balance it does not exist anywhere on this earth.

And nine months of evenings spent on that half is not diligence. It is a man doing an impossible job carefully.

You are living downstream of decisions you did not make, and you are not responsible for reconciling them, and the fact that they will not come out is not a report on your competence. That is written into a psalm about a book that was complete before anybody's first day, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes it possible to close a ledger, which nobody does by concluding that they ought to.

And here is the last thing, and it is why this is a comfort rather than a shrug.

The book is not lost. That is the difference between this and resignation.

Aaron's version, before that conversation, was that the truth of what happened is simply gone: a man died and a bookkeeper moved abroad and the reason went with them. And that is unbearable to a certain kind of mind, which is exactly why he was still at the desk at half past eleven.

The psalm says otherwise. There is an account. It is complete. It is accurate. It is not in his handwriting and he does not have access to it, and it exists, and it is held by somebody who was present for every entry.

There was a movement five hundred years ago obsessed with records: registers, minutes, sessions, everything written down and kept, and one of the most careful traditions in Europe about it. And underneath all that paper was a conviction that the real book is not the one on the shelf, and that a man may keep his accounts honestly and still be spared the burden of being the final ledger.