The Counting I Thought I Left

The gate latch. Twice. Then once more, which makes three, which is fine, because three was never the number.

Four was the number.

She had not done four in eleven years and she would have told you, cheerfully, at a dinner table, that she used to be like that in her twenties and is not any more. She has said exactly that, more than once, in that light tone people use for the parts of themselves they have finished with.

Then there was a bad six weeks. Nothing enormous. A job that ended, and a friend who moved away, and a scan that turned out to be nothing but took nineteen days to turn out to be nothing.

And on a Tuesday in the middle of it she found herself at the gate at half past eleven at night with her hand on the latch, and she had done it four times, and she had no memory of deciding to do any of them.

She went inside and sat on the bottom stair with her coat still on.

Because what she felt was not fear about the gate. She has never actually believed anything happens if the gate is wrong. What she felt, sitting there in a cold hallway, was something much worse, which was the sense of a door opening at the back of the house.

It is still here. It has been here the whole time. The eleven years were a good season and not a change.

She is thirty-three. That was four months ago and it has settled down again, mostly. The gate is usually twice now, which she can live with.

But the sentence has not gone, and it has done more damage in four months than the counting did in eleven years, because the counting was only ever about a latch, and the sentence is about her.

What came back and what did not

Let me say the mechanical thing first, plainly, because I think it will take some weight off before anything else can.

An old pattern that returns under load has not been waiting. It has not been hiding at the back of the house biding its time, and it has not been secretly true about you for eleven years.

What has happened is much duller than that. Under a bad six weeks your system reached for the most familiar way it knows of producing the sensation of control, the way an exhausted hand reaches for a rail on a stair it has used for years. Availability is not identity. The rail being there does not mean you have been leaning on it the whole time.

So the counting came back. And the sentence that came with it, which is doing the actual harm, is not a report from the counting. It is a separate thing that arrived at the same moment and got itself believed by association.

Here is what is true, and I want you to hear where the effort sits in it.

Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before.Philippians 3:13

Notice that Paul does not claim the past has stopped existing. He says he forgets it, deliberately, as a practice, which is the language of a man who could remember it perfectly well if he chose to and has decided what to do with his attention instead.

And notice what he is reaching toward. Not a state he has to achieve before he is allowed to stop looking back. Things that are before, already there, already in front of him.

You are one of the people that verse is written to and the forgetting is something you are permitted to do, and that is not encouragement for a woman on a stair, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the sentence rather than on your general familiarity with Philippians.

Now let me go at the sentence itself, because it is the whole enemy here.

The eleven years were a good season and not a change.

That is a claim about your nature made on the evidence of one Tuesday at half past eleven at night in the middle of the worst six weeks you have had in a decade. It would not survive five minutes anywhere that evidence is weighed properly, and it has been running unchallenged in your head for four months because you have never once said it out loud where it could be examined.

You are a woman who did not do four for eleven years. That is not a season. That is a decade of a life, and Scripture puts the reaching forward in the present tense for people who have a behind to forget, and the Spirit of God has been with you through all eleven of those years and through the six bad weeks and on the bottom stair in your coat.

I want to say something about the scan, too, and the nineteen days.

You have described that six weeks as nothing enormous. A job ended, a friend left, and you waited nineteen days to find out whether you were ill. You have been minimizing an objectively hard season in order to make your own reaction to it look worse. That is not humility. Scripture does not require it, and the Spirit is not the one asking you for it.

And here is the last of it. You are not a woman with something at the back of the house. The word says the things that are before are what you are reaching for, and the Spirit is the one carrying you toward them, and a latch counted four times on the worst Tuesday of a bad year has never been a description of a person.