The Page With The Date On It

It is about two thirds of the way through, and the notebook still opens there if you let it, because a book remembers where it was held open longest.

You wrote the date first. You always did. Top right, small.

Then one request, in the middle of the page, with a lot of white space around it, because it was the only thing you had to say that night and it did not want company.

You have not turned back to that page since.

You kept the notebook. You did not throw it out and you did not tear anything, and it moved house with you, and it sits on the shelf with the others. You have written in it since, further on, other things, ordinary things.

But there is a section of that book you turn past with the flat of your hand, quickly, the way you would pass a photograph you are not ready to look at yet.

And every so often, like tonight, you open the book at the wrong place and there it is, that date, in your own small handwriting, sitting up in the corner of the page like it has been waiting.

Let me say something plainly before we go on.

I am not telling you off.

You did not fail at anything. Not turning back to a page is not the same as giving up, and I am not going to suggest that the request has not moved because you stopped visiting it.

I am saying I know that page exists. That is all. And I am going to sit here with the book open while we talk.

The other book

Here is a psalm about a book that was being written well before yours.

Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.Psalm 139:16

Read the end of it, because that is the part that undoes most people. When as yet there was none of them.

The days were written down before the days existed. Not predicted. Written. The image is of a record made in advance by somebody who was not waiting to see how it went.

Which means the date in the corner of your page is not the beginning of anything. That date was already in a book, in somebody else's handwriting, a very long time before you put a pen to it.

So let me turn and speak straight at you, with the notebook open on your knees.

You are written into a book that was finished before you started keeping yours. Not one day, not when you can face the page, not once something moves. Right now, sitting with a book you turn past with the flat of your hand, you are inside Psalm 139, and it was written for the person whose own record has a gap in it. That is not my comfort. That is what is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a written line and lays it on a real person on a real evening with the rain on the window.

Now, why did you never turn back?

Because that page has a date on it, and a date is a measurement. Every time it comes into view, something calculates a distance rather than simply reading a request, and the distance grows on its own without any help from anybody.

That is not a lack of faith. That is arithmetic, and arithmetic is involuntary, and a person cannot look at a dated page without doing it.

But look at what the psalm does with time, because it does something very strange with it. It refuses to treat the passage of days as evidence of anything. In continuance were fashioned. The days are being made, one after another, by somebody who already has them written, and a day that has not yet gone the way you hoped is not a day that has escaped the book.

And hear this, because it is settled and not still open. You have not gone off the record while the page stayed shut. The word says all my members were written, and the writing was done in advance, and it is His Spirit who carries a written promise across two years of a book turned past quickly.

A closed page is not a headstone. It is a page.