This Day Was Written Down Too

He has a way of talking about it that he has never examined, and his wife noticed it before he did.

He says back when I was really walking with the Lord.

He says it easily. He says it in front of people. He said it at a table in front of his own son, and his son looked up, and then did not say anything, and that look is the reason this is on his mind at all.

He is fifty-four. The years he means are roughly twenty-three to thirty-five. He does not think about it in numbers usually, but if you pushed him, that is the block. That is when things happened. That is when he prayed for a woman in a car park and something happened that he still cannot account for. That is when he read the whole of the New Testament in six weeks and could not stop.

Since then there has been a mortgage, a redundancy, a good job, a bad year, two children, a father's funeral, a knee operation and about six thousand ordinary days.

And what he believes about those six thousand days, in the place where a man's real beliefs sit, is that they are afterward.

Not wasted. He would not say wasted. Just: after the part that counted. He has been living, without ever deciding to, in an epilogue. A section at the end of a book that nobody reads carefully because the story already happened.

Every one of them, written down

David writes something in Psalm 139 that ought to end the epilogue idea permanently, and it is easy to read past because of how it is phrased.

Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.Psalm 139:16

The book. The days written in it. And the last clause: when as yet there was none of them.

Every day was written before there was a single one of them. Which means today was in the book before your twenty-third birthday was in the book, and both of them went in at the same time, in the same hand, with no section headings and no part marked and afterward, some remaining days.

You are living inside a day that was written down with the same care as the ones you keep quoting. That is not me softening a bleak sentence for you; it is what the written word says about how a life was recorded, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a psalm about a book and lays it across six thousand days a man has filed as an appendix.

What actually happened between then and now

Now let me look at the twelve years you call the real ones, because I do not think you have looked at them honestly, and I say that with affection.

Twenty-three to thirty-five. What was in those years? Time. A great deal of unstructured time, and few dependents, and a body that recovered from things, and the specific intensity of a person to whom everything is happening for the first time.

I am not explaining the car park away. Something happened there and it was God and I would not touch it.

But you have taken a set of circumstances and mistaken them for a spiritual altitude, and then you have measured every year since against an altitude that was partly a diary.

You have been comparing seasons on terms that were never fair to either of them. Scripture says His mercies are new every morning, which is an even distribution and not a peak with a long descent afterward, and the Holy Spirit has been in six thousand days that nobody wrote a story about.

And there is a cost to the epilogue idea that I want you to see clearly, because it is not just sad, it is doing something. If this is the part after the story, then nothing that happens now is load-bearing. Nothing counts. So a man stops expecting anything on a Tuesday, and then nothing happens on Tuesdays, and he takes that as confirmation.

You were never handed an ending, and no part of your life has been designated as afterward. The written word puts every day of a person in one book with no divisions in it, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who told you the interesting section is closed.