None Of It Appears Anywhere

Rafael was asked to fill in a form last month, and there was a box on it that asked what he had done, and he sat looking at that box for a long time.

Not because there was nothing. Because none of it goes in a box.

Here is a partial list from the last eleven years. Four funerals, two of them for people whose families had nobody else to ask. About nine hospital corridors, and one of those was fourteen hours. A drive at two in the morning to a place ninety minutes away, twice, for the same person, eight months apart. A great many kitchens.

None of that is on any record anywhere. There is no register of corridors. Nobody logs the drives. The funerals exist in somebody's paperwork but not with his name on them in any way that would survive a search.

And it is not only that the world has no record. He has not got one either. He could not, sitting there with the form, reconstruct the eleven years in any orderly way. It arrives as a texture rather than a list, and the list he did produce took him twenty minutes and he knows it is incomplete.

So there was a box, and he wrote something short and generic in it, and he felt something he did not expect, which was not resentment.

It was closer to vertigo.

Because if none of it is written down, in what sense did it happen? He knows it happened. He was there. But a life that leaves no trace begins, in certain moods, to feel like a life that has not been lived, and that is a strange thing to feel at fifty-eight about years he would not have swapped.

You have your own version. There is a great deal you have actually done, and there is no place where any of it is recorded, and there was a moment recently where that landed on you.

Nobody here is going to suggest you start keeping a record. That is not the answer and it would turn the work into an inventory.

But there is a sentence in Hebrews about remembering, and the surprising thing is which of God's attributes it puts it under.

He is not unrighteous to forget

There is a verse in Hebrews that says something about God's memory in a construction most people read straight past.

For God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love, which ye have shewed toward his name, in that ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister.Hebrews 6:10

Not unrighteous to forget.

It is a double negative and it is doing something precise. It does not say God is kind enough to remember, which would put remembering under His mercy and make it a favor.

It puts forgetting under injustice.

Which means that for God to lose track of Rafael's eleven years would be a violation of His own righteousness, and the whole weight of the sentence is that this is not a thing He could do and remain what He is.

That is a considerably stronger claim than comfort. It is not that He probably remembers. It is that forgetting is not available to Him.

And your unrecorded years are held by something firmer than kindness. That is not my encouragement: the written word files this under God's righteousness rather than His mercy, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man sitting in front of a form.

And the ministering is named in the present tense as well. The word says ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister, and the second clause is ongoing, and the Spirit is the one who applies that to a Tuesday in the eleventh year rather than only to a finished account.

What the vertigo actually is

Here is the part worth being precise about.

The feeling in front of that box is not self-pity and it is not a demand for credit. Rafael has never once wanted his name on anything and would be embarrassed by it.

It is that a person builds their sense of their own life partly from external structure. Records, roles, things you can point at. Most people have some. And a man whose actual work has produced none of it has to hold eleven years entirely from the inside, unaided, and memory is not built to do that alone.

So the vertigo is not a moral failing or a lapse in faith. It is what happens when you ask one person's recollection to carry the whole weight of a decade that nothing else is holding.

And you are not the only one holding it. The word says the Lord knoweth them that are His, and knowing is His action rather than yours to maintain, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a real second set of hands under the years rather than a nice thought.

And you have not imagined any of it. The word says He putteth my tears into His bottle, are they not in Thy book, and it presents God as keeping a record of things nobody else logs, and the Spirit is the one who lets a man believe that about corridors and drives.

Nobody is telling you to start writing it down

I want that plain, because it is the obvious advice and it is wrong.

Do not start a log. A shepherd with a record of his own kindnesses has changed what the kindnesses are, and you would know it within a fortnight, and it would put something between you and the next corridor.

And do not go back and reconstruct the eleven years for your own reassurance. You cannot, it will be incomplete, and the incompleteness will hurt more than the box did.

What is available is the other thing: the record exists, it is not yours to keep, and the keeping of it is filed under His justice rather than His generosity.

And nothing about your standing depends on any of it being visible. The word says by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit that you are a child of God, which is a fact about parentage rather than a summary of a decade.