The Card in the Bible Every January

There are nineteen of them in the back of that Bible and she can tell you what year each one is without looking.

They are the little cards from the front of the church, the ones with the printed prayer and a line for a name and a line for a date. She takes one every January, the first Sunday, and she fills it in at the kitchen table on the Monday morning with the good pen, and she puts it in the back with the others, and the elastic band round them has been replaced twice.

The first one is 2007 and the handwriting on it is different, firmer, a woman of forty-eight with a hard year behind her and something settled in her face. The rest are all the same handwriting and all the same words and all the same reason, and the reason is this: by about November, every year, she cannot feel it anymore, and she gets frightened, and January is when the church puts the cards out.

Ruth is sixty-seven. Nineteen cards. She has never told the pastor and she has certainly never told her daughter, and if you asked her about it she would tell you it was a good discipline and change the subject, and there would be something in the way she said it that would stop you asking again.

Here is what I want to say about those cards before anything else, and I want it said properly, because plenty of people would laugh at her and I am not going to have that.

That elastic band is holding nineteen years of a woman refusing to let go of God. Every one of those cards was signed by somebody who wanted Him more than she wanted her own comfort, on a cold Monday, with the good pen. That is not foolishness. There is not one thing shameful in that stack.

But it is nineteen, and she is tired, and there is a sentence in Hebrews with a word in it that would let her keep the cards and stop adding to them, and nobody has ever read it to her.

You may not have cards. But you have your January. You have a season where it thins out and a ritual that puts it back, and you have done that ritual more times than you have told anybody.

Once, and what once has to mean

The writer of Hebrews is arguing with people who understood sacrifices very well, and his whole case rests on a comparison of frequency. Their offerings were annual. His was not.

For then must he often have suffered since the foundation of the world: but now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.Hebrews 9:26

Read the first half, because it is the half people skip. Then must he often have suffered. The writer is saying: if this needed doing more than once, He would have had to die more than once. That is the arithmetic. A thing that needs repeating needs the whole cost repeating with it.

And then: once in the end of the world. Once, at the culmination of the ages, He appeared, and what He did was put away sin. Not manage it annually. Put it away.

You are dealing with a thing that was put away once, and it is already done, and if it needed the second January it would have needed the second cross. I am not making light of nineteen cards at a kitchen table. It is written in Hebrews 9:26, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries an old argument about frequency to a woman with an elastic band round her whole faith.

What thins out in November, and what does not

Now here is the honest part, and it is not the part Ruth expects.

Something does thin out in November. She is not imagining it. Every year, as the light goes and the year gets long, the felt sense of God gets quiet in her, and by the last week of the month she cannot find it at all, and that has happened nineteen times in a row like clockwork.

That is real and it is not sin and it is not a warning. It is a woman in the north in November.

What she has done, without ever deciding to, is treat the thinning as information about her standing, and then use the card to fix her standing, when the card was never able to touch the thing that had actually changed, which was the light.

You have a standing that does not thin with the year, and it is already fixed, and it was fixed at the end of the ages rather than at the start of each one. Scripture says Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever (Hebrews 13:8), and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds a written sameness steady over a woman in the dark end of a year.

Keep the cards. Stop adding to them.

And here is what I would actually say to her at that table, with the coffee going.

Nobody is asking her to throw the cards away. That stack is a record of a faithful woman and one day her daughter will find it and cry.

But there is a difference between a keepsake and a transaction. A wedding photograph on a wall is a keepsake; the marriage was not made by the photograph and does not need a new one taken every January to stay in force. Ruth has been photographing her marriage annually out of fear that it lapsed.

You are in a settled covenant and it is already in force, and nothing about it comes up for renewal. It is written that He appeared once to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes the word once land as rest rather than as a rebuke.