Every Book on the Shelf

Four bookcases along the wall of what used to be the third-grade classroom, and Verna has run them since the year they took the felt board down. Saturday morning, the heat clicking on and off, a work table under the window with the tape and the clear plastic covers, and the annual job of going along the shelves pulling anything with a broken spine.

She knows this collection the way a person knows a kitchen. Two hundred and eleven titles. She could put her hand on any one of them with her eyes shut, and when somebody stands in that doorway and says they are going through something and they do not know what to read, Verna has an answer inside four seconds and it is usually the right one.

She has also read every book on those four shelves. All of them. Some twice. Forty-odd years of Saturday afternoons and Tuesday evenings and a chair by the window at home.

This morning she pulls one out with a cracked hinge, a hardback on the Psalms, blue cloth, and she opens the back cover out of habit. The old card pocket is still glued in there from the days when they used cards, and the card is still in it, and her own initials are on it six times in six different pens.

She read this book six times.

She opens it in the middle and reads half a page, and it is like reading a stranger. Not a sentence of it is familiar. Not the argument, not the chapter title, not one image.

She stands there with the blue book in her hands longer than she means to.

And what comes is not despair, because Verna is not built for despair. It is flatter than that, and older, and it arrives in a plain voice: I have taken in more of this than almost anybody in this building, and I could not tell you what one page of it did to me. Where did it all go? Is there anything in here at all?

Then the heat clicks off, and she puts the blue book on the mend pile, and she keeps going down the shelf.

You know the shelf. Yours might be a stack of sermon notes, or a Bible with twenty years of underlining in it, or a study you have been in so long that you have taught it twice. And you know the flat voice, the one that shows up in the middle of an ordinary job and asks where all of it went.

The dinners nobody remembers

Ask any person in that building what they ate on an ordinary Tuesday four years ago. Nobody knows. Nobody has ever known. And every one of them is standing up, on bones that were rebuilt out of exactly those forgotten meals, in a body that replaced most of itself while they were busy doing something else.

That is not a clever comparison. It is the one the New Testament reaches for when it talks about taking in the word, and it reaches for it constantly. Milk. Strong meat. Desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby (1 Peter 2:2). Grow thereby. The growing comes by the milk, not by the memory of the milk, and no infant has ever been able to itemize what it drank.

You are being built by meals you cannot name, and that is the ordinary way a body works. Scripture put growth and food in the same sentence on purpose, and it is His Spirit who makes a fed word do its work down where nobody is watching, which means the record of what went in was never kept in the part of you that can be questioned about it.

The writer of Hebrews takes it one step further and it is worth slowing down for. He says strong meat belongs to those of full age, and then he says how you would know such a person: by reason of use have their senses exercised.

But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.Hebrews 5:14

By reason of use. Not by reason of recall. He is describing a woman who can put her hand on the right book in four seconds for somebody standing in a doorway in trouble, and who has no idea that is what he means.

You have a growth that shows up in use and was never designed to be produced on demand. The word describes it as exercised senses and not as retained pages, and the same Spirit who trains those senses does the training quietly, over years, in the middle of Saturday jobs.

Let us go on, and he put himself in the sentence

Now the anchor verse, and it needs its context or it turns into a stick.

Just before it, the writer of Hebrews has said some hard things to this congregation about being slow. He is not gentle about it. And then, at the top of chapter six, watch what he does with all of that.

Therefore leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on unto perfection.Hebrews 6:1

Let us go on. He is a man who has just finished describing a slowness, and the very next thing out of his mouth puts himself in the boat with them and points at the horizon. He does not send them back to the beginning. He does not tell them to go and prove that the earlier teaching took. He says the foundation is laid, we are not laying it again, and we are going on.

You are on the moving side of that sentence and not the assessed side, because the writer never left anybody standing still to be measured. It is written as let us go on, in the first person plural, and His Spirit is the one who carries a reader forward, which is a direction of travel rather than a grade on a page.

And notice what he does not do. He does not audit them, or ask for a summary of what they retained, or set a standard for where they should be by now. He names a direction and starts walking, and he assumes they are coming.

You have a foundation the word says is already laid, and it is not being laid again. Hebrews 6:1 calls it laid and then moves past it, and the Holy Spirit who inspired that line is not in the business of making a person dig up their own footings every few years to check whether they are still there.

The word does not come back empty

Here is the sentence that settles the flat voice in the library, and it was written six hundred years before the library existed.

So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.Isaiah 55:11

Read what that verse actually promises and what it does not. It does not promise that a reader will remember. It does not promise a feeling at the time, or a sentence she can quote at a funeral. It says the word does not come back to God empty, and that the accomplishing is His pleasure and His sending.

You have a promise about the word itself and not about your retention of it, and the promise is the stronger of the two by a distance. God said His word will not return void, and it is His Spirit who does the accomplishing in the thing He sent it to do, which puts the outcome of forty years of Saturday afternoons entirely outside the reach of a bad memory.

That is why the question in the doorway is the interesting one. A woman who cannot recall a paragraph of a book she read six times can nevertheless hear thirty seconds of somebody's trouble and put her hand on the right thing on the second shelf. Where did she get that? Not from the pages she remembers. She does not remember any.

You were fed into a place you have no window onto, and that is where the feeding was always meant to land. The word describes senses exercised by use rather than facts held in store (Hebrews 5:14), and the Spirit does that shaping under the floorboards, in the dark, without a receipt.