The Porch Step at Nineteen

She was nineteen and it was August and the step was still warm from the day.

Her mother was in the doorway behind her with a dish towel, and they had been talking about her cousin, and about the church, and about how you can tell a person means a thing. And she said it out into the yard, not to her mother, though her mother heard it:

Lord, I will read Your word every morning of my life until I die.

She was not showing off. Anybody who knew her then will tell you she was the most serious nineteen year old in that county.

She is fifty one now, and here is the thing that undoes her: she cannot tell you the year she stopped. Not the year. Not the season. There was no last morning that she remembers as a last morning. Somewhere between the babies and the second job and her mother's long illness, the mornings quit being mornings with the book in them, and she did not notice it happening, and now the not knowing is worse than knowing would have been.

Because if you know the date, you have a thing that happened. If you do not know the date, you have a character.

That is what she carries. Not I broke a promise in March. But: I am the kind of woman who lets a thing like that go without even noticing.

You may have one like that. A promise with no end date on it, that simply thinned until it was not there, and now you could not defend yourself if you wanted to, because you do not have the facts. And somewhere along the way you quit trying to come back, because how do you apologize for something you cannot even date.

The difference between a thing you did and a thing you are

Let me say the honest thing first, the way my grandmother would have said it, which is plainly.

A broken promise you can date is a thing that happened. A broken promise you cannot date feels like a report on your character, and character is much heavier to carry, because you cannot put down what you think you are.

That is the pit. And I want you to see that the pit was dug by the calendar and not by God.

Come with me to Hebrews, to the place where the writer quotes Jeremiah about the covenant God makes, and read the last line of it slowly.

For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.Hebrews 8:12

You are carrying an investigation that God closed before you ever opened it. Hebrews 8:12 says their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been holding you inside that through every year you cannot name.

He is not working out the year either

Here is what strikes me every time.

You have spent years trying to reconstruct a timeline in order to know how bad it is. And the God you are reconstructing it for has said, in writing, that He does not hold the record you are trying to rebuild.

He is not up there with the dates. He is not waiting for you to arrive with an accurate account of when the mornings stopped so He can assess it properly. There is no file. You are the only one in this house doing forensics.

You are carrying an investigation that God closed before you opened it. Hebrews 8:12 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that out of a letter to a first century congregation and sets it down in a fifty one year old woman's kitchen.

And notice the shape of that verse. It is not: I will overlook it if you can explain it. It is not: I will be merciful in proportion to how sorry you are. Mercy first, and then the sins remembered no more, and both halves are things He does and neither half is a thing you supply.

You have been given mercy that did not wait for your account of yourself. It is written in exactly those terms, and that is the plain sense of the verse, and the Spirit of God has been holding you inside it through every year you could not name.

What thinning is, and what it is not

Now I want to say something about the way it went, because how it went has been used against you.

You did not renounce anything. You did not stand on a step at thirty and take it back. What happened is that a life came in on top of it: babies, a second job, a mother who took eleven years to die. And a thing that is not fed thins out, and thinning is quiet, and quiet things do not get noticed until they are gone.

That is not a special wickedness. That is what happens to everything unwatered. It happens to gardens and to friendships and to fiddle playing, and nobody thinks a woman is depraved because she has not picked up a fiddle since her mother got sick.

You are a woman a hard life ran over, not a woman who threw something away. That distinction is in the way Scripture speaks of us as dust and as sheep and as bruised things, and the Spirit of God has never once confused the two, however many years you have.

And I am not going to help you reconstruct the timeline. Not one year of it. A list is a courtroom with the furniture moved around, and there is not a courtroom on this porch.