Everybody Elses Ledger

The shoebox is older than the laptop and it will outlast it. Index cards, ruled, one per household, in a hand that has been three different hands since 1974, and Ellen has kept it since the year her youngest started school. The directory goes to the printer Monday. It is Thursday night, the dishes are done, and she is at the kitchen table with the box open at one end and the proof pages fanned out across the rest.

She works down the list. The Ferreiras have moved to the east side of town. Dale's number has changed twice and she has finally got it right. The Okonkwo girl is back and wants to be listed at her parents' address again. Carl needs the word elder after his name now, which is a thing she would not have believed eleven years ago, and she is glad, and she types it.

And the whole time she is doing it, a second list is running that she never asked for and could not switch off if she tried. Dale does not drink anymore. The Okonkwo girl came home. Carl was a hard man to sit in a meeting with and now he is the one who stays behind to help stack the chairs. Ruth started teaching the fours and fives and it turns out she is the best they have ever had. Ellen could go down all fifty households and tell you, off the top of her head, one true thing God has done in nearly every one of them, and she would be right, and she would not be exaggerating.

Then she gets to the F's and there is her own card. Same street. Same phone number for nineteen years. Same name, same church, same seat, same everything.

And the question that arrives is not dramatic. It arrives politely, in her own voice, the way it has arrived for years: what would somebody write on mine?

She sits with that for a minute. She thinks of Dale, who has a before. She thinks of Carl, whose change you could photograph. She turns her own card over and the back is blank, the way the back of a card is blank, and she looks at it a while and then puts it back in the box and keeps typing.

You know the box. Yours might be a prayer list, or thirty years of watching a congregation come and go, or just a very good memory for what God has done in other people. And you know the question, the small polite one that comes when you get to your own name in the alphabet.

Nobody watches a field grow while standing in it

Corinth had a version of this argument and it got loud. People were lining up behind their favorite preacher, Paul's people over here, Apollos's people over there, and the whole church was busy attributing growth. So Paul answered them with a farm.

I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase.1 Corinthians 3:6-7

Read what he actually did there. He did not deny the growth. The Corinthians were growing and he knew it. He took the one part of the work that no human being had done and gave it back to God, and in doing so he told a whole city something about the nature of increase: it is not a thing anybody in the field is positioned to watch.

You are inside the one field you were never given a vantage point over. Scripture puts the increase in God's hands in that verse and leaves it there, and it is His Spirit who does the growing, quietly, in the dark, on His own timetable, in a place the person growing does not have a window onto. A farmer can go out at dawn and look at the row and see nothing at all happening, and be looking straight at it.

That is not a poetic dodge. It is how the thing works. Ellen can list what God has done in fifty households because she has been standing outside all fifty of them for thirty years, watching. There is exactly one household she has never once been able to stand outside of.

You have God's own division of labor set out in a single sentence, and your name is on the planting and the watering and nowhere near the increase. The word says neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but God who gives the increase, and the Spirit who wrote that through Paul was steadying a church that had gotten the credit wrong in one direction and would have gotten it wrong in the other just as easily.

New creation, not a list of improvements

Now here is where the question itself needs looking at, because it comes loaded. What is different about me now? asks for a list of improvements: behaviors dropped, habits gained, a temper cooled, a bottle put down. Those are real and they are worth having. But they are not what Scripture reaches for when it names the new thing.

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.2 Corinthians 5:17

A creature. A creation. Not a renovation, not a program of self-improvement with results to date, not a column of gains. Something made, by somebody, out of nothing that was there before.

You are looking at a word that describes a making and not a measuring. Scripture says creature and creation there and not progress (2 Corinthians 5:17), and the same Spirit who hovered over the face of the waters at the very beginning is the one at work here, which means what happened is a question about His act and not about anybody's inventory.

And Paul goes further in another letter, and this is the sentence Ellen needed at that kitchen table more than any other.

For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.Colossians 3:3

You have a life that the word itself calls hidden, and hidden is not a polite way of saying absent. Something is hid with Christ in God, which is not a bad address, and it is His Spirit who keeps it there, safe, out of reach of the person who would otherwise spend her Thursday nights auditing it. Paul did not write that to make anybody anxious. He wrote it to a church that was being told to go and look for evidence in themselves, and he told them where their life actually was.

The one card she has never been able to read

There are fifty households in that box and Ellen has read every card except one. Not because she will not. Because a person cannot get far enough away from herself to see herself the way she sees Dale.

You were never in a position to answer the question that has been bothering you, and that is not a deficiency in you. It is written into the picture Paul chose: a field does not report on its own increase, and His Spirit does the increasing whether or not the field ever files a word about it. She has been asked to be witness and subject at once, and nobody has ever managed that.

Here is the part that would settle it in a second if anybody ever said it out loud in that church. Ask Dale what has changed in him and he will name the drinking and then stall. Ask Carl and he will get embarrassed. Ask Ruth about the fours and fives and she will tell you about the children. Every single one of the fifty would give a shorter, thinner answer about themselves than Ellen could give about them, and every single one of them would go home and wonder if that meant something.

You have permission to stop building a case you were never appointed to argue. The word never once asks a believer to produce an inventory as the ground of anything, and the Holy Spirit, who searches all things and knows the deep things of God, is not in need of a summary from the one He is working in.