Checking Whether You Were Right

Rosie has a list, and it is not a list she would show anybody, and she has never once called it a list.

It lives in her head, mostly, though there are two things written in the back of an old diary. It is the record of things she said would go a certain way, and how they went.

She started it without starting it. Six or seven years ago she said something at a table, it was not taken up, and about a year later it happened, and she remembers a very specific small feeling: not triumph, more like a bookmark being placed. And ever since, without deciding to, she has been placing bookmarks.

Now, when she says something and it is not received, part of her makes a note of the date.

She noticed the habit properly last month, and she noticed it because of how fast she moved.

Something she had mentioned about eighteen months ago came up in conversation, and she was three sentences into a perfectly casual retrieval of when she had said it and to whom, before she caught herself. Nobody had asked. The conversation had not been about her. She had spotted an opening and gone for it, smoothly, the way you do a thing you have practiced.

And she went quiet and let the conversation move on and thought about it for the rest of the day.

Here is what troubled her, and it is worth being precise.

It was not that she wanted credit. She would have been mortified if anyone had given her any. What she wanted was much smaller and harder to name: she wanted the fact of it to be in the room. Not attributed to her. Just present, so that something in her could stop.

You have your own version. There is a tally somewhere, formal or not, and you would deny it if asked, and you know roughly what is on it.

Nobody here is going to tell you whether any of it was right. That is not mine to say and this site does not do that.

But there is a psalm about the quietness underneath all of this, and it is three verses long.

The shortest psalm about ambition is not about ambition

There is a psalm of David that is only three verses and is usually filed under humility, and it is really about the interior of a person who has stopped needing an outcome.

LORD, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty: neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me.Psalm 131:1

Neither do I exercise myself. It is a working word. It is the language of practicing, of running something over, of applying effort to a thing repeatedly, and he says he does not do it with matters that are too high.

Which is to say: there are things that are not his to settle, and he has stopped working at settling them.

That is the exact description of Rosie's list. Whether she was right about a thing eighteen months ago is a matter that has already been decided by events. There is nothing to do about it. And she has been exercising herself in it anyway, quietly, for six years, running it over, keeping the record.

And you are permitted to stop working at it. That is not my instruction: the written word puts neither do I exercise myself in the first person as a description of a settled man rather than as a command laid on a tired one, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman who caught herself three sentences into a retrieval.

And the wanting was not wickedness. The word says hope deferred maketh the heart sick, and it names that as a condition rather than as a sin, and the Spirit is the one who makes that distinction real in somebody who has been quietly ashamed of a list.

What the checking is actually for

Now the useful part, because naming the habit is not enough to shift it.

The checking is not about accuracy. Rosie does not doubt her memory and she is not building evidence for a case she intends to make.

The checking is a search for permission to keep going.

That is what the bookmark does. Every time a thing lands the way she saw it, something in her is authorized for another stretch, and the authorization lasts about as long as the next unheeded sentence, and then the search begins again.

Which means the list is not vanity. It is a person trying to run a ministry on a fuel that was never supplied, and topping it up from the only source they have found, and it works badly and it is exhausting and it is entirely understandable.

And your authorization does not come from your accuracy. The word says the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance, which puts the permission in His hands rather than in the record of events, and the Spirit is the one who bears witness with your spirit about what you are.

And you are not required to prove it to yourself. The word says the Lord knoweth them that are His, and knoweth does not wait on a demonstration, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a resting place rather than a technicality.

The second half of the psalm

There are two verses after that one and they are what the first is for.

David describes himself as a weaned child with its mother. Not a nursing child, which is a picture of a baby getting what it needs and settling. A weaned one, which is a child who is with its mother and is not getting anything, and is content anyway.

That is a startling image for this, because it is exactly the position of somebody with sight and no hearing. Present. Loved. Not being fed the thing they came for.

And the psalm calls that quietness rather than deprivation.

And you are able to be quiet without a verdict. The word puts the weaned child in the mouth of a man describing his own soul, and the Spirit is the one who makes that possible rather than leaving it a pleasant image about somebody else's temperament.