The List I Cannot Make Fit

It is not written down anywhere and you could recite the whole of it standing at this fence.

Seven things, near enough. Some of them are about what happened to your brother's family. Two of them are about a passage you have read forty times and cannot get to sit flat. One of them is about a man you knew who was better than you and did not get what he asked for.

They are not doubts exactly. You would not call yourself a doubting man and neither would anybody who has known you.

They are the things that do not fit, and you have been carrying them the way a man carries stones in a coat pocket, which is to say without complaining and without ever putting the coat down.

And here is what you have come to believe about them, and you have never said it to another living person.

You think the list is the reason.

You think that a man who cannot get seven things to sit flat is a man who has an obstruction in him, and that God is looking at the obstruction, and that this is why the thing you have been asking about for eleven years has not moved.

Now, before we go anywhere near the list, hear me.

I am not correcting you.

You have not done anything wrong by carrying it. A man who has read a passage forty times and still cannot make it fit is a man taking it seriously, and that is a great deal more than most people manage.

I am saying I know how many are in the coat. That is all.

Until I went in

Here is a man in a psalm who has exactly your problem and does not resolve it.

When I thought to know this, it was too painful for me; until I went into the sanctuary of God; then understood I their end.Psalm 73:16-17

Read what he does with the thing he cannot make fit.

He has spent most of that psalm looking at people who do wrong and prosper, and he says plainly that thinking about it hurt. Too painful for me. He does not pretend to have solved it and he does not tidy it up.

And what changes is not that he gets an argument. He goes into the sanctuary.

He takes the unresolved thing into the presence of God, in his pocket, unfixed, and what shifts is his vantage point rather than his information.

So I want to turn now and speak this over you, leaning on that rail with the light going.

You are welcome in the sanctuary with the coat on. Not one day, not once the seven things sit flat, not when you have got the passage to behave. Right now, exactly as you are, you are the man in verse seventeen, and he walked in there carrying the whole unresolved lot. That is not my kindness. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who sets a written line down in a real man on a real evening.

Now the plain thing, and there is no clause coming.

The list is not why.

Not why the eleven years have gone the way they have gone. Not why your brother's family got what they got. I am not going to say something careful about hindrances and I am not going to leave a small door open for you to walk back through at three in the morning.

Seven things that will not sit flat is not an obstruction. It is the ordinary condition of a man who has been paying attention for sixty years in a world where a lot does not fit.

And this next part is settled rather than pending, so hear it. You have never once been assessed on whether the pieces line up. The word says until I went into the sanctuary, and he went in with the problem still in his hands, and it is His Spirit who carries a written line into a real field at a real hour of the evening.

You do not have to empty the coat before you go in. That has never been the arrangement and nobody who told you otherwise was reading carefully.