The Notebook Of Everything She Tried

The chain on the porch swing has one link that ticks, and it only ticks on the way back.

Ruthann has the notebook open on her knees. Spiral bound, the cardboard cover gone soft as cloth, a rubber band around the whole thing because the front board came off in the spring. Three different pens in it, which is how you can tell roughly what year you are reading.

It started out sensible. She began it so she would not go round the same track twice, the way a person keeps a note of which seed did well in which bed.

Said nothing at all for eleven days. Eleven.

Wrote it out plain and left it on the table. Gone by Sunday. No telling if it got read.

Drove out Thursday. Sat in the truck at the end of the lane the better part of an hour and came home again.

Asked straight out. Got the shrug.

Made the good supper. Set two places.

Backed all the way off. Two months, and I did not call once.

Went back in.

Forty pages of that, front and back, and somewhere in the second year it quit being a plan and turned into a record, and a record only reads one way once you have decided what it is a record of.

Out at the road the mailbox door is hanging open the way it does. The light is coming long and low across the cut hay, and there is a dog barking two farms over about nothing, and the whole valley smells like it does in the week after mowing. It is, by any measure a person could name, a beautiful evening.

Ruthann turns the pages back to front with her thumb, the way you flip a deck. She is not reading them. She has them.

She could show you the exact page where she stopped believing she was any good at this. It is not a dramatic page. It is a Tuesday with four words on it, and under the four words a half inch of white space, and then the next Tuesday.

The swing ticks on the way back.

Maybe there is no notebook in your house. But you have kept the tally somewhere, in a drawer or in your head, and you have read it the same way she reads hers. Not as a list of the times you went out of your way. As a list of the times it did not work. And underneath that reading is a sentence you have never once said out loud, which is that if you were a better person you would have found the thing that finally worked, and you did not, so here you both still are.

That Is Not A List Of Failures

Read the pages back with me for a second, only differently.

Eleven days of saying nothing, which cost you more than talking ever did. A note written out plain and left where it would be found. An hour in a truck at the end of a lane. A supper made. Two months of a silence you kept on purpose. A door you went back through when going back through it was the hardest of the options.

You are looking at forty pages of a woman who kept turning up. Psalm 68:19 said what it is going to say about the weight long before you wrote a word of that in, and the Spirit does not need me to talk you into a verse that was already true when the pen was moving.

"Blessed be the Lord, who daily loadeth us with benefits, even the God of our salvation. Selah."Psalm 68:19

There is a second reading of that same line, and the old translators knew it: blessed be the Lord, who daily bears our burden. The Hebrew carries both at once, and both are true of Him, and the one you need this evening is the second.

Daily bears our burden. Not oversees it. Not supervises it while you carry it. Bears it, the way a man gets under the end of something and takes the weight so the other person can straighten up.

You have been grading yourself on an outcome that was never once entered in your name. That is written, not wishful, and His Spirit is what carries it off the page and onto a porch. Look at what your notebook actually measures. Every line in it is a thing you did. Not one line in it is a thing you were able to make happen inside another human being, because there has never been a line like that available to anybody, in any notebook, in any language.

The Load Changed Shoulders A Long Time Ago

Here is the part that is hard to hear the first time, so hear it slowly.

Mercy is an act. It is a supper carried, an hour given, a silence kept, a door gone back through. It has a beginning and an end, and it fits inside an afternoon. What mercy is not, and has never been, is a result produced in somebody else's life. Those are two different things that the English language lets us blur together, and blurring them is how a kind woman ends up with a notebook she cannot bear to open.

You were never handed a person to fix, and no better effort would have changed that. The Spirit has been saying something like that on that swing for a good while now, and Psalm 68:19 puts it out in plain daylight: the burden is borne daily, by Him, and the word chose the verb on purpose.

Think about how that word works. Daily. Not once, in a large gesture. Not at the end, when the thing resolves. Every ordinary day, without ceremony, the load is being taken by somebody who is not you and has never asked you to relieve Him of it.

Which means your limits are not a moral failure. They are just true, the way it is true that you cannot reach the top shelf. You are living inside limits that God has never once held against you. You are not taking that from me. His word says the Lord daily bears our burden, and the same Spirit who moved on the man who wrote it is the one settling it on you now, on a swing, in the smell of cut hay.

And notice that nothing here asks you to care less. Care is not the problem. The problem is a woman doing the work of two, and one of the two is God.