The Stone With the Name Cut In

Every Sunday after the meal, when the plates are stacked and his mother has gone to sit down and the little ones are loose in the yard, Rubén does the same thing without ever meaning to.

He does the list.

It is not written anywhere. If you asked him about it he would deny it and then, if you waited, he would tell you every item, in order, because he has been over it that many times.

Item one: he prayed, at twenty-three, in his cousin's car, and he meant it. Item two: he stopped two things that year and one of them has stayed stopped. Item three: he reads in the mornings, not every morning, but most. Item four is the weak one and he always slows down here: he thinks he loves God. He cannot always feel it. But he thinks he would be very sad if it turned out not to be true, and he has decided that counts for something, and it is the fourth item on a list of four.

Four. That is the whole inventory. Twenty-two years of following Christ and the evidence file has four items in it, and one of them is a maybe.

And every Sunday at about half past three, with the coffee going and his father asleep in the chair and somebody's child shouting in the yard, Rubén runs the list, and every Sunday it comes out short. Not damning. Short. Like a man checking his wallet at a till and knowing before he opens it.

He would never say any of this at the table. At the table he is the one who prays over the food.

And you keep a list too. It is possible you have never called it that. But you have an inventory somewhere of the reasons it is probably true about you, and you have counted them recently, and you know exactly how thin the file is, and you have never once been able to put it down.

I want to show you something Paul wrote to a young man in a shaky season, because it is about a seal and a foundation and a knowing, and none of the three belong to you.

Read whose knowing it is

Let me put the pit in plain words, because the list is a symptom and not the disease.

The disease is that you have been asked, by nobody in particular, to be your own guarantor. To produce, out of your own life, enough evidence to satisfy a question that your life was never able to answer in the first place. So you gather what you can, and it is always thin, because a human life examined honestly is always thin, and then you carry the thinness around like a verdict.

Paul is writing to Timothy in a moment when people are falling away and the young man is rattled. He steadies him with one image.

Nevertheless the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are his.2 Timothy 2:19

Look at where the seal is. It is not on you and it is not in your hands. It is cut into the foundation, and a foundation is the part of a building that nobody living in the house can see or reach or damage.

And look at whose knowing is inscribed there. The Lord knoweth them that are his. Not: they know that they are His. His knowing is the seal. Yours never was.

You are known by God, and it is already inscribed, and it was cut into the stone by Him and not by you. I am not saying that to comfort a man over coffee. It is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a seal cut for a shaky young pastor and lays it under a man doing arithmetic on a Sunday afternoon.

A list is a bad foundation because it is a moving one

Here is what a builder in any town could tell Rubén in about ten seconds.

You do not put a house on something that moves. Not because moving things are worthless, but because a foundation has one job and it can only do it by being the thing that does not shift while everything above it does.

Now consider his list. Item three moves every week; some mornings he reads and some he does not. Item four moves with his health and his sleep and how the week went. Even item one, the prayer in the car at twenty-three, moves, because his memory of it is clearer in some seasons than others.

He has built a house on four things, and all four of them move.

You have a foundation that is standing sure right now, and it was already standing before you ever started your inventory. Scripture says the foundation of God standeth sure, and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds that written line steady under a man whose own evidence moves with the weather.

What the list was actually for

I want to say something kind about the list before we set it down, because it did not come from nowhere.

Rubén started it in a hard year, when he was frightened, and it was the best he could do, and God was not offended by it. A man counting his four small things in the dark is not a man being faithless. He is a man trying to hold on with what he has.

But a rope you grip is not the same as a floor you stand on, and he has been gripping for twenty-two years when he could have been standing.

You are on ground that holds without your grip, and it is already sure, and it holds on the Sundays your list comes out short. It is written that the Lord knows those who are His, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a man from holding on to standing up.