The Line Through It

The notebook is a hardback one with a green cover, and Rosalind is on her fourth.

She keeps them in the drawer under the phone, all four, because you do not throw those away. The current one has a list at the back that she works down most mornings. It is not elaborate. Names, mostly, with a word after each so she knows what it is about. Some of them have been crossed off with a tick, which is her favorite sort of crossing off, and there is a small system of arrows for the ones that changed.

And on the third page, about two thirds down, there is a line through one of them.

Not a tick. A line. Drawn with the same biro, in one movement, without pressing hard.

She could tell you almost to the week when she did it. She was not upset when she did it. That is the part she has thought about since. There was no scene, no crisis of faith, no evening of hard questions with a friend. She simply came to it one morning, the way she had come to it several hundred mornings, and her hand did not want to, and she sat there for a moment and then drew a line through it and went on to the next one.

It felt, at the time, like tidying.

She has never told anybody. What would she say? Nothing happened. That is the whole content of it. She asked for a long time and nothing that she could see ever moved, and one Tuesday she stopped, and the sky did not change color, and she made the tea.

And here is the thing that makes it complicated, and it is why she is reading this.

She still prays. She prays for other people with real fire. She will pray for you in the street, and she means it, and things happen, and she can tell you about them. She is not a woman whose faith fell over.

She has one line, on one page, in one notebook, and she cannot look at it directly.

Sometimes when she is working down the list her eye goes past it and something small and old turns over in her chest and she keeps reading, and by the fourth name she is fine again.

And here is where I stop talking about Rosalind, because you know exactly which line I am talking about in your own.

It might not be written anywhere. Most of them are not. You simply noticed, at some point, that you had not said it in a while, and then that not saying it had become a decision, and then that the decision had got old. And you have never quite gone back, because going back would mean lifting it up again, and you know how heavy it was when you put it down.

Stopping is what a tired person does

Let me say the first thing carefully, because the opposite has almost certainly been said in this house already.

You did not fail.

Drawing that line was not the moment your faith gave out. It was the moment a person who had been carrying something for years put it down, which is what people do, and which is what bodies and hearts are built to do, and which happens to everyone who has ever asked for anything over a long stretch of time.

Tiredness is not unbelief. They can look identical from the outside and they are not the same thing at all. Unbelief argues. Tiredness just goes quiet.

And I am not going to argue you back into it either. There is nothing here trying to talk you into hope. The arguments have all been heard already, and most of them are probably agreed with, and agreeing has never once been the problem. The problem is a private conviction that God does this for other people, and a matching private conviction that your one is different, and it would be embarrassing to say that out loud because it sounds ridiculous and it will not stop being true.

So instead of an argument, here is a sentence about what happened during the quiet years.

You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book?Psalm 56:8

Look at what is being described there, because it is strange and specific and it is not a general comfort, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a written line like that from staying general.

Tossings is the word for turning over in a bed at night. That is a man saying: the times I could not settle, the nights I turned over, the restless hours nobody was in the room for. And he says God kept count of them.

Then he says something odder still. Put my tears in Your bottle. Somebody collected them and kept them, deliberately, and did not pour them out, and has them still. Then a question, and it is not a fearful one: are they not in Your book?

He is not asking whether God noticed. He is stating that God has a record, and he is leaning on it.

So here is what that means for a green notebook with a line through page three.

The years you asked are not gone. They were not wasted breath scattered into an indifferent room. Every one of those mornings went somewhere and is held somewhere, and the four years since, the quiet ones, are held too, because a God who bottles tears does not lose a request just because the person carrying it got tired and stopped saying it out loud.

You stopped. He did not move on.