The First Page of a New Journal

The journal was a present, and it is nicer than anything she would have bought herself.

Hardback. Cloth over the boards, a dark green. A ribbon sewn into the spine and one of those elastic loops for a pen. Her sister gave it to her at Easter and it has been on the shelf in the kitchen since, upright between the cookbooks, and tonight she has taken it down.

Everybody is out. The dishwasher is on its long cycle. She has a pen, a mug going cold at her elbow, and the book open at the first page, which is unlined and cream and absolutely empty.

She has been sitting here twenty five minutes.

The problem is not that she has nothing to say. She has a great deal to say. It has been building for about fourteen months and it is the reason she took the book down. The problem is that every single sentence she tries out in her head opens the same way.

I know I should have started this years ago.

I am sorry it took me until now.

I wish I had come to this at twenty five, when I had the energy.

I do not know why it took me fifty two years.

She tries starting with the date, and the date makes it worse, because a date is a number and numbers invite arithmetic and the arithmetic is the whole trouble. She tries a verse, and it feels borrowed, a way of not saying the true thing. She tries the word Today, and looks at it, and it looks like a woman clearing her throat.

At ten to eleven she caps the pen. She does not tear the page out, because tearing the first page out of a nice book is its own kind of statement. She closes it on the ribbon, puts it back between the cookbooks, and goes up to bed feeling worse than when she came down.

You know the first page. Yours might be a fresh notebook, or a first conversation with someone at church, or the opening line of a prayer you have started twenty times. And you know the apology that arrives before the content does, and how reasonable it sounds, and how completely it has stopped you.

The apology at the top of the page

Let me ask about the apology itself first, because I do not think anybody has ever asked you where it came from.

It sounds so obviously right that it has never been examined. Fifty two years is a long time, and the wish to have had them is honest, and the sentence forms itself before anybody consents to it.

But an apology is addressed to somebody. So who, exactly, is it addressed to.

Not to God, if you look at it honestly, because you would not put an apology to God at the top of a page and then be unable to continue. You would say it and go on. This one is not being said. It is standing in the doorway collecting a toll, and a thing that stands in a doorway collecting is not repentance. It is an invoice.

You are not in arrears with God, and you were never issued a statement. Scripture has no ledger in it where a person is billed for the years before they came, and the Holy Spirit does not open an account against a life in order to hand somebody a balance at fifty two.

Look at what the invoice is doing to you, which is the tell. Repentance frees a person to move. This has kept you sitting in a kitchen for twenty five minutes and sent you to bed worse. Whatever that is, it is not the Spirit of God, whose corrections have always ended with a person on their feet.

You have a page in front of you that was never a settlement of accounts, and it is already yours to write on. It is written that there is no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1), and it is the Spirit of life who says so, which means the toll booth in that doorway was put there by somebody without the authority.

The man who wrote it was eighty

Now let me take you to the psalm, and to who wrote it, because it changes what kind of document it is.

Psalm 90 is the prayer of Moses, the man of God. It is the oldest psalm in the book and it is written by somebody who had every reason to do arithmetic on his own life.

Forty years in Egypt. Forty in the desert with sheep, which he did not plan and would not have chosen. He was eighty when a bush burned and a voice sent him back, which means the work he is known for started at an age when most people are being helped into chairs.

And read what he does with the numbers. He does not wave them away.

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.Psalm 90:10

That is not a comfortable verse and he did not write it to be one. He counts the years, he calls them short, and he says out loud that they go by and we are gone. Then two verses later he asks God to teach them to number their days so they can apply their hearts to wisdom.

Look at that carefully. He is asking to count more accurately, not less. There is no pretending in this psalm that time is not real or that lost years do not sting.

You are allowed to grieve the years honestly, and you were never asked to talk yourself out of it first. Psalm 90 does the counting out loud and God kept it in the book, and the Spirit who inspired that psalm is not standing over a fifty two year old asking her to be less sad about it than Moses was.

I am not going to hand you a sentence that makes the fourteen months, or the thirty years, stop mattering. They mattered. That is why you took the book down off the shelf. Anybody who tells you the lost time was nothing is asking you to lie in order to feel better, and it never works for more than an afternoon.

You have a grief that is permitted to sit at the table with you, and it is already known by somebody who wrote the shortness of a life into a psalm. The word carries Moses saying the years are soon cut off, and the Holy Spirit is not embarrassed to be in a kitchen with a woman who is sad about her own arithmetic.

Satisfy us in the morning

And then, having counted honestly, watch what he asks for. This is the hinge and it is one verse later.

O satisfy us early with thy mercy; that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.Psalm 90:14

The word behind early is the ordinary Hebrew word for morning. In the morning. At daybreak. It is not a word about a stage of life and it never has been, and it is not asking God to have satisfied them earlier on, back when there was more of it left.

He is asking for morning mercy. And a morning is not a season you missed. It is a unit that arrives, unearned and on schedule, every single day a person is alive, including tomorrow, including at fifty two, including for a man who did not get started until he was eighty.

You are inside the exact request this psalm makes, and it is already available at the hour you are actually standing in. Psalm 90:14 asks for mercy in the morning rather than mercy in the youth, and the Spirit of God brings that morning around again without consulting anybody's age.

Jeremiah says the same thing from the middle of a ruin: His compassions fail not, they are new every morning, great is Thy faithfulness (Lamentations 3:22-23). Written by a man looking at a burned city. Not new every decade. Every morning.

You have a morning coming that is not a discounted one, and it is already new rather than something you have to qualify for. It is written that His mercies are new every morning, and the same Spirit who kept that sentence alive through a siege is not rationing it out to people who arrived late.