Counting What I Might Have Lost

It starts at about half past ten, when the house has gone quiet, and it never finishes, and she has done it most nights for six years.

It is not worry exactly. Worry is about the future and this is not about the future. It is an audit. Camille sits out on the veranda with the light off and the plants moving a bit in the warm air, and she goes through it: the year she was not walking with God, what it did, what it might have cost.

That is the operative phrase and she has never noticed how strange it is. Might have cost. Not what it did cost, which she could name, because she is precise and she has thought about it enough. What she is trying to establish is the invisible half. Whether something was forfeited. Whether there was an inheritance or a portion or a nearness that got signed away in that year, and whether what she has now is the whole thing or the remainder.

And every night the sum runs and every night it does not close, because there is no way to audit a thing you cannot see, and by about midnight she goes in.

She is a teacher and she is good at it, and if you asked her class or her church they would tell you she is one of the most settled people they know. She teaches other women. She is asked to.

And she has been running an unclosable sum every night for six years.

If you are running one too, hear the question first, before any comfort: whose ledger did you think you were auditing?

Because there is one verse where Jesus states what He was told to do, and it settles who is responsible for the keeping, and the sum only ever ran because it was assigned to the wrong person.

He states the instruction He was given

And this is the Father's will which hath sent me, that of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day.John 6:39

This is Jesus describing His own commission, out loud, in public.

This is the Father's will which hath sent me. He is not stating a hope or a general principle. He is stating the instruction under which He was operating.

That of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing. Read whose job that is. The losing or not losing is assigned to Him. It is His responsibility, given to Him by the Father, and He names it as the content of His mission.

And then, so nobody can mistake it for a temporary arrangement: but should raise it up again at the last day. The term of the assignment runs to the end.

You are inside an assignment that was given to Christ, and it is already His responsibility, and the losing or keeping of it was never on your ledger. I am not soothing a precise woman at half past ten. It is written in John 6:39, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence about a commission and lays it on somebody doing sums in the dark.

Why the sum never closes

And now the specific mercy for a mind like hers, because she does not need reassurance, she needs the fault located.

The sum does not close because it cannot. She is trying to audit an account she has no access to, using evidence that does not exist, about a period that is over. There is no procedure by which that calculation could ever balance, which is why six years of intelligence and discipline have produced no result whatsoever.

It is not a failure of effort. It is a task with no possible completion, and she has been assigning it to herself nightly.

And underneath it is the assumption the verse dismantles: that the keeping of what she was given is her responsibility, so that any period of not walking with God is a period in which she was, in effect, an unsupervised custodian of her own inheritance.

She was never the custodian.

You are held by someone who was told to lose nothing, and it is already His charge, and there was no window in which you were left in charge of it. Scripture says of all which He hath given me I should lose nothing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an impossible task off somebody who was never assigned it.

What the year did cost, and what it did not

Now I am not going to leave out the honest part, because Camille would hear the omission.

That year cost. She knows what it cost in her, and there are things she is slower at than she would have been, and she does not need me to tell her that a year like that is not free. Scripture never treats conduct as weightless and neither will we.

But there is a difference between what a year costs and what a year forfeits, and she has been running them together in the dark.

Cost is real and it is visible and it can be worked with. Forfeit is the invisible thing she has been trying to audit, and the verse says the account she was afraid of losing is being kept by somebody with explicit instructions.

You are dealing with cost and not with forfeit, and the keeping is already assigned, and the two have been running together in the dark for six years. It is written that He should lose nothing but raise it up at the last day, and the Holy Spirit is the one who pulls two things apart that a good mind has been tangling nightly.