There Is a Book With This In It

There is a period he refers to, in his own head, as the time, and it ran from about twenty-four to about thirty-one.

He does not romanticize it. He would tell you there was a lot of noise in those years and some of it was people who turned out badly. But there were things he cannot explain and does not try to. There was a week in a house in Leeds. There was a man he prayed with in a stairwell who is still walking with God thirty years on and sends him a message every year in October.

He is fifty-eight. And between thirty-one and fifty-eight there is a stretch he thinks of, and this is his own word, as the flat bit.

What is actually in the flat bit: twenty-seven years of turning up. A marriage he has worked at properly. Two children who are not a credit to him because that is not how it works, but who both still speak to him and to each other. Every Tuesday for nine years driving a minibus for a lunch club. Money given quietly and consistently and never once mentioned. A brother-in-law he has visited in prison, sixteen visits, most of them awkward.

And what he believes about all of it, in the place beneath his theology, is that none of it registered.

Not that it was wrong. That it was not written down. That God's attention had been fully engaged during the time, and that since then he has been doing decent things off the record, in a period nobody was taking minutes.

Somebody was taking minutes

Malachi has a moment that reads almost like an aside and is nothing of the kind. There is a group of people talking to each other in a discouraging season, and then this happens.

and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the LORD, and that thought upon his name.Malachi 3:16

Read the qualifying criteria, because they are the entire point. Those that feared the LORD, and that thought upon His name.

Thought upon. Not preached. Not delivered anybody in a stairwell. Not had a week in Leeds. The recorded activity is a man having God in mind, and a book gets written about it.

You have been living in a period God was taking minutes on the whole time. That is not me being generous with an obscure verse; Malachi 3:16 says a book was written for exactly that kind of person, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line out of a discouraged century and lays it over twenty-seven years a man calls the flat bit.

And notice when it happens. This is not a golden age. Malachi is the last of the prophets and the mood is exhausted; people are saying out loud that serving God is pointless. That is the setting God chooses for writing a book of remembrance. Not a revival. A discouraged season, among people keeping on.

What He says the record is for

Then comes the line that I think will actually get you, because it tells you what the book is for.

And they shall be mine, saith the LORD of hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels.Malachi 3:17

Not a performance record. Not an assessment. He is describing gathering up the things He values, and the people in the book are what He is gathering.

You have imagined a ledger of achievements with a gap in it. What Malachi describes is closer to somebody collecting what belongs to them.

You are named in a record God keeps in order to gather what is His, and He has never once kept it as a scoreboard. The written word says the book was written before Him for people who merely thought upon His name, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that from being ancient history and makes it an account of a man with a minibus.

And let me put something beside the twenty-seven years, because you have been unfair to them in a way you would never be to anybody else. Sixteen awkward prison visits. Nine years of Tuesdays. A marriage worked at when nothing about it was interesting. If a man told you that was his flat bit you would take him apart, gently, and you would be right.

You were never off the record, and there has never been a period nobody was taking minutes on. Scripture puts the writing in a discouraged era among unremarkable people, and the Holy Spirit has been the one holding that true through every quiet decade.