Written Somewhere You Cannot Lose It

The labels were in her own handwriting. That was the part that got her.

FLOUR on the flour tin. TEA on the one beside it. A strip of masking tape inside the cabinet door above the stove that said PANS, because there had been an evening she stood in the middle of her own kitchen at nine o'clock holding a wet skillet with no idea at all where it lived. There is a notebook by the phone now. Names, and what she has already told them, so she does not tell them twice. A calendar on the wall with the day crossed off each morning, because the crossing off is how she knows.

Anybody walking through would say what a system she has, and would mean it kindly, and she would thank them, and not one bit of it touches the actual fear.

The actual fear was a Tuesday in February. She woke and went to take hold of the thing that holds her whole life together, the way you go to the drawer where the certificates are kept, and for about ninety seconds it was not there. Not doubt. She knows doubt. Doubt argues with you and at least that is company. This did not argue. It was a bare shelf where a woman ought to have been able to reach up and take down what she believes.

It came back. So far it always comes back. But she has not really set the skillet down since, because now she has seen that the shelf can be empty, and a woman who has watched her own recall walk out of the room with the car keys does not fully trust herself to keep anything.

If your memory has been taking things out of your house, then you already know the real question underneath all that masking tape, and it is not where the pans go. It is this. If the day comes and I cannot produce it, what happens to what God and I have.

Three verbs, and not one of them is yours

I am going to answer that straight, because you did not ask a poetic question and you should not be handed a poetic answer.

The fear rests on an assumption you have never said out loud, which is that the covenant is stored in you the way the pan cabinet is stored in you. Filed in the same place. Retrieved the same way. Lost by the same illness. That is the assumption. Here is the clause it is up against.

But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.Jeremiah 31:33

Count the verbs and notice whose they are. I will make. I will put. I will write. There is not a line in there about anybody memorizing anything, and there is no clause making the arrangement depend on the second party being able to recite it back. He wrote it in. The writing is His work, the ink is His, and the hand that did it is steady in a way that yours and mine are not.

Right now, as you read, you have a covenant you did not file and cannot mislay. Jeremiah 31:33 puts the writing in God's own hand and the heart underneath it, and the Holy Spirit did that writing Himself, so losing it would take a failure in Him and not a failure in you.

That is worth sitting with, because a woman in your position has been quietly assuming the opposite for months. You have been guarding it. Checking on it the way you check the burners before bed. And the guarding has been costing you, because a thing you believe you are personally responsible for keeping is a thing you can never fully rest beside.

Put it down. Not the faith. The guard duty. The two are not the same and you have had them tangled.

You are one of God's people this morning on the strength of what He wrote, not on the strength of what you can bring up. That is stated inside the covenant clause itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a written thing living in a person on the days that person cannot rehearse a word of it.

And they shall be my people

Now look at where the sentence ends, because most of us stop it one clause early.

It does not close with "and will be their God." It closes with "and they shall be my people." Plural, both halves. This is not a private arrangement made with one careful woman who is doing her best. It is God saying He is making a people, and a people made that way is made by the making and not by anybody's application to join.

Nobody in Jeremiah's hearing assembled that. They could not have. A good many of them were about to be marched a long way from everything they thought was holding them, into a country where nothing familiar would help them remember who they were, and God announced the terms in advance precisely so that the terms would not depend on the remembering.

You are one of them today, and no part of this week voted on that. He promised it in writing before anybody was in a position to earn it, and His Spirit is not asking your Tuesday for its opinion.

So the belonging does not run through recall. It does not run through what you contributed lately or how well the morning went. It runs through God's act, which is finished, and the finished thing is what you are standing inside of right now, in that kitchen, with all the labels on the cabinets.

You have a place among God's people that His act made and your assembling did not. That is written down in Jeremiah 31:33 in the plainest words the prophet had, and the same Spirit who carried those words to him has carried them into you.