Nobody Kept The Book

She rang three numbers on a Tuesday afternoon and that was the whole investigation.

The first was the number on an old order of service she found in a Bible that used to be her aunt's. It rang out. It rang out for a long time, in the way that old numbers do, with that particular tone that tells you nobody has held that line for years.

The second was a woman called Sister Ophelia who had been on the door for two decades and whose number she got from a cousin. Sister Ophelia was ninety and delighted to hear from her and talked for forty minutes about her mother, which was, she will tell you, worth the whole afternoon. And when she finally got round to asking, Sister Ophelia said, "Baby, we did not keep a book like that. Pastor Wilks had a little diary and I could not tell you where it went."

The third was the denominational office in another state, which was polite, and looked, and had nothing. The congregation had never been formally affiliated. It had met in three different buildings across thirty years, the last of which was a converted dance studio, and when it wound up in the nineties, the way things wound up, everything went into somebody's basement and the somebody has died.

So there is no record.

There is no card, no line in a register, no photograph she has been able to find. What there is, is her own memory, which is good, and four people who were there and are alive, one of whom is her sister and would say yes to anything to make her feel better, so she has never asked her.

She was seventeen. It was a Sunday evening. It was in a converted dance studio with the mirrors still on one wall covered over with sheets.

She is fifty-three now and she has been in ministry for nineteen years and she has led two hundred people through the very thing she cannot document about herself.

And here is what it does. It does not touch her love for God, not for a second. What it touches is something quieter and more administrative and, she has come to realize, more corrosive: the feeling of being unlisted. Of being someone whose name is not written down anywhere in this. And she has caught herself, more than once, at the back of a room while somebody else's name is read out, feeling a small, unworthy, entirely human pang.

Somebody kept a book

I want to go straight at the pang, because you have been calling it unworthy and I do not think it is.

The pang is not jealousy. It is a woman who has spent nineteen years making sure other people are seen, standing at the back of a room, noticing that there is no room in which her own name gets read.

That is not small and it is not a character flaw. It is a genuine ache and it has a genuine answer.

Then they that feared the LORD spake often one to another: and the LORD hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the LORD, and that thought upon his name.Malachi 3:16

There is a book. That is the first thing, and it is not a metaphor in that passage, it is presented as an act God performed in response to something He overheard.

And look at what got written in it. Not ceremonies. Not dates. Not the records of a congregation. What went into that book was people who feared the Lord and who thought upon his name, and the qualifying activity is entirely interior and entirely unrecordable by any human institution.

You are written in a book of remembrance, and the writing of it was not delegated to Pastor Wilks or his little diary, and that is not a lovely thought I am extending to a woman with a filing problem, it is the written word, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is going into the quiet administrative place rather than the theological one.

Now let me say something about Sister Ophelia and the forty minutes about your mother.

You have described that as worth the afternoon and I think you were more right than you knew. You went looking for a record and what you got was a ninety-year-old woman who remembered your mother in detail, unprompted, for forty minutes.

That is not a consolation prize for a failed search. That is the second half of the verse arriving in the middle of the first: they that feared the LORD spake often one to another, and the Lord hearkened and heard it. You were being spoken about with love on that phone call, and the word says God listens in on exactly that, and the Spirit was in that conversation as surely as He is in any service.

I want to touch the nineteen years, too.

Two hundred people. You have stood beside two hundred people at the moment they went, and you have made sure each of them was seen and named and made a fuss of, and you have done that partly, if you are honest, because you know what it is not to be.

You have not been giving away something you do not have. Scripture says your name is in a book written before God Himself, and the Spirit of God in you is the reason nineteen years of that work has had power in it rather than being an impressive performance by a competent woman.

And here is the last one, and this is the one for the back of the room.

You are not unlisted. The listing is simply not held anywhere a phone call can reach. There is no register in a state office and no card in a basement and no line in a book kept by anybody now living, and the word of God says a book of remembrance was written before Him, and the Spirit inside you is the seal on it, and a seventeen-year-old in a converted dance studio with sheets over the mirrors was seen and written down by the only recordkeeper who has never lost anything.