The List in the Wallet

Behind the card for the pharmacy, folded twice, there is a piece of paper about the size of a stamp with four dates on it.

He wrote the first three from memory in one sitting, at a kitchen table, in 2019. The fourth he added the same night it happened, in the car, which is why the ink is different.

They are the four times Efraín has responded. A retreat in the mountains when he was twenty. A Wednesday at his aunt's church at twenty-six, which he does not like to think about because of how he behaved the following year. A tent in the summer at thirty-one. And the night in 2019, at forty, alone, in a room with a phone face down, which is the one he would say was the real one if he had to pick, and he has picked, many times, and then unpicked.

He takes the paper out perhaps twice a month. Usually in a cafe, usually alone, usually after he has been thinking about his father. He unfolds it and looks at the four dates and does the same thing every time, which is to try to work out which one of them was it.

Because one of them must have been. That is the logic he has been living inside for years and has never once said out loud: that there was a real one and three near misses, and if he could establish which, he would know where he stands.

And he has never been able to establish it, and so he folds the paper back up and puts it behind the pharmacy card and pays for his coffee and goes back to work.

If you have your own version of that paper, whether it is written down or only carried in your head, then you know the arithmetic. You have been trying to identify the one that counted. And the reason you have never managed it is not that your memory is poor. It is that the question has a false shape, and I want to show you the verse that changes it.

What the once was for

For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God.1 Peter 3:18

There is a once in that sentence and there is a that, and the that is the part Efraín has never had.

Christ also hath once suffered for sins. One event, and Peter is emphatic about the number, exactly as Hebrews is. The suffering does not recur and it does not need to.

That he might bring us to God. This is the purpose clause. The once was not simply a payment made in a ledger somewhere. It was a bringing. Somebody was carried from one place to another, and the carrying is what the once accomplished.

So the question is not which of four dates was the real transaction. The question is who does the bringing, and the verse answers it before it finishes: He does.

You were brought to God by Christ Himself, and it is already done, and the bringing was accomplished by the once and not by any of your four. I am not being generous with a man's private paper at a cafe table. It is written in 1 Peter 3:18, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a purpose clause from an old letter and lays it on a man doing arithmetic over a small cup.

What the four dates actually are

Now let me say something good about that list, because Efraín has treated it as evidence of instability and it is not.

Four times in twenty years, a man turned toward God. Under different roofs, at different ages, in different weathers of the soul. That is not a record of four failed attempts. It is a record of a man who kept turning up, and every one of those nights was real, and God was present at all four.

They are not four competing transactions. They are four arrivals at one house.

You are welcome at that house, and it is already open to you, and it has been the same house every time you came. Scripture says that the one who comes to Him will in no wise be cast out (John 6:37), and the Holy Spirit is the one who has met a man at a retreat, at a Wednesday service, in a tent and in a room with a phone face down.

The one thing that is not on the paper

And here is the turn, and it is the reason this article exists.

Everything on that paper is something Efraín did. Four dates, four responses, four moments of his own turning. And a man reading his own actions back to himself will never find certainty there, because human action is exactly the kind of thing that can always be reread with a worse eye.

What is not on that paper is the date of what Christ did.

That date is fixed, it is public, it happened outside Efraín entirely, and it is the only date in this whole business that his memory cannot revise.

You have a date that is not yours to doubt, and it is already in the past, and nothing about it depends on which of your nights was the good one. It is written that Christ suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a man's attention from his own four dates to the one that settled it.