The Ribbon Is Still in Luke

The ribbon is exactly where she left it, halfway down a page in Luke, and that is how she knows precisely how long it has been.

Fourteen months. The book has moved twice in that time, from the arm of the chair to the shelf by the door, and then to the pile on the sideboard, where a water bill and a supermarket leaflet are doing the work of a bookmark. She dusts around it. Once she lifted it to get the hoover underneath and put it straight back, face down, ribbon in.

For nine years there was a Tuesday. A front room with too many chairs crammed into it, a plate of biscuits nobody needed, and seven women who knew what her sister had been through and asked after her without ever having to be reminded. And she was the one who read the passage out. Every single week. She would work at it across the whole weekend, turning it over while she cooked, because on Tuesday somebody would look up and say what did you make of it, and she wanted something in her hands worth handing over.

Then the woman whose front room it was moved to be nearer her son. It was nobody's fault. Everybody said we must keep this going, and everybody meant it, and life went and did what life does.

And here is the part you have never said out loud to anybody. You did not stop reading because you stopped loving Him. You stopped because nobody was going to ask.

The room He named, and who was in it

Let me say the weight out loud before we go near lifting it, because you have carried it politely and alone, and I am not walking past it.

You think you have become a woman who does not read her Bible. Not a woman in a dry season. A different category of person altogether. And underneath that sits a colder thought you have never let finish itself: if the whole thing fell over the moment nobody was watching, perhaps it was never mine. Perhaps I was reading for the seven chairs. Scripture tells the truer story, and the Holy Spirit makes that written truth living now.

That thought is doing real damage and it is not true, and the sentence that takes it apart is one you have known since you were small.

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.Matthew 6:6

Look at the room He chose.

Not a hall. Not the front room with seven chairs in it, lovely as that room was. He named a cupboard. A door pulled shut. One person, and the Father who is in secret. And notice why the door shuts. Not so nobody can hear you. So nobody can see you. Which means the practice He described was designed, from the beginning, for a room with no audience in it at all.

He built it for exactly where you are standing. Scripture names the secret room, and the Holy Spirit makes its welcome present rather than theoretical.

Nothing in that demotes your Tuesday. He was in that front room, and the biscuits and the seven chairs and the woman who asked what you made of it were a real kindness of God for nine years. But that room was never the machinery that made your morning count. It was scaffolding around something always load bearing on its own, and when scaffolding comes down we do tend to assume the building is going with it.

The ledger nobody asked you to keep

Now the other thing holding that ribbon in place, which is the arithmetic.

Fourteen months. Somewhere in you there is a ledger with every missed morning written on it, and you have quietly decided you may not open the book until you can account for them. That is not conviction. Conviction is specific and hands you something to do. This has only ever handed you a number. Scripture gives you daily bread instead, and the Holy Spirit makes that freedom living.

Let me take the ledger off you, and I will do it with bread.

When God fed a whole nation in the wilderness He did it by the morning. Every morning, every person, as much as they could eat. And Scripture is particular about what happened when anybody held some back: what was kept until the next day bred worms and could not be eaten. It would not be stockpiled, and not because He was strict. Because that is what daily bread is. It comes daily, it refuses to be banked, and a thing that cannot be banked cannot be owed.

You are not fourteen months behind. There is no such thing as being behind on manna. There is only this morning's, and this morning's is already on the ground.

Which also, thank God, kills the streak. A streak is a stockpile with a number on it: it makes yesterday the judge of today, and the day it breaks it tells you a lie about what you are. His compassions are new every morning, and new is not a smaller word than unbroken. Scripture gives that morning mercy, and the Holy Spirit makes it present. You cannot lose a streak with a God who starts fresh at dawn on purpose.

So no plan is coming. No minimum, no chart, no boxes to tick, nothing you could fail by Thursday. You have been measured enough for one lifetime and I am not handing you a new set of scales in a kinder font.

He is not waiting at that table for you to arrive with fourteen months of reading done. He has been at the table.