The Tally I Started At Nineteen

Twenty to eleven on a Sunday night, and Rhonda Beckwith is in the brown chair with the television on mute and a mug of tea she made an hour ago and has not touched.

The house is done. The dishwasher is on its long cycle. Everything that had to happen today happened.

And here it comes, the way it comes every Sunday somewhere around this hour, quiet as a cat getting up on the arm of the chair.

The tally.

It runs like this. There was a woman at the bus stop outside the fabric store in March, who said something about her sister and looked like she wanted to keep going, and Rhonda said that's so hard and got on the bus. There was Perry from the second floor, who came into the break room in the fall with his eyes red and stood at the window for a while, and Rhonda made her coffee and went back to her desk because she genuinely did not know what to say. There was the man on the plane. There was the girl who used to babysit. There was her own brother, twice.

That is this year's page. The tally has other pages, and it has been running since she was nineteen.

It started at a spring mission week on a campus with a hundred folding chairs in a gym, and the man who spoke was earnest and kind and he loved every student in that room. He said that every person you meet is either walking toward Jesus or away from Him, and that you are somebody's last chance. He said it because he believed it and he wept while he said it.

And Rhonda, nineteen, in the fourth row, took out a notebook and wrote down four names.

She has never stopped writing down names.

The notebook is long gone. She is forty seven now and the tally lives somewhere behind her eyes and does its work without paper. It never announces itself during the day. It waits for a house that has gone quiet.

She would not call it guilt if you asked her. She would call it being realistic. She would say, look, I have had thirty years to say one useful sentence to somebody and I have basically never done it, and that is not self pity, that is just the arithmetic.

The dishwasher clicks over into its next stage. The mug is cold. On the muted screen a man is silently selling a mattress.

Rhonda sits there for another forty minutes and does not go up, because there is no point going up while the adding is still going on.

The bread of sorrows has a recipe

Solomon wrote a short psalm about building. It is five verses long, and the second of them describes a Sunday night with a precision that ought to be unsettling.

He names three things: getting up early, staying up late, and eating the bread of sorrows. That last one is a Hebrew way of saying you are living on anxious toil. It is not a diet of food. It is a diet of effort that has to keep going or something bad happens.

And Solomon's point is not that early rising is wrong or late nights are wrong. His point is about what is holding the house up. If the Lord is not building it, then the labor is the whole load bearing structure, and a person carrying a load bearing structure cannot put it down to sleep.

You are eating the bread of sorrows on a Sunday night, and Scripture named that meal long before anybody handed you the recipe. I am not saying that to diagnose you. Psalm 127:2 is on the page, it has not moved in three thousand years, and what the Holy Spirit adds is that the last line of the verse has your name on it and not somebody steadier's.

It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep.Psalm 127:2

Read the last clause the way it is actually written. He gives His beloved sleep. Not He gives sleep to those who finished. Not He gives sleep once the tally comes out even. The sleep is given on the grounds of belovedness, which is a status, not a score, and it is handed to people while the account is still open.

Now, about the man in the gym with the folding chairs.

He was not lying to those students, and this is not the part where we go back and prosecute him for it. He loved them. He wept. He believed every word, and a good deal of what he said is in the New Testament, and the urgency in his voice came from somewhere real.

What happened was smaller and more ordinary than a lie. A true and beautiful thing about God's heart went into a nineteen year old's ear, and by the time it came out of her pen it had become a system with names in it, and nobody in that gym could have seen that happen.

You were carrying a system that nobody in the room built and nobody in the room intended, and it has been running on you ever since. That is not a verdict on anybody who taught you. Psalm 127:2 is not written against builders, it is written about what holds the building up, and the Spirit's work here is to lift a weight, not to hand you somebody to blame for it.

There is nobody at the other end of the ledger

Here is the strange thing about a tally, and it takes a minute to see it.

A ledger requires two parties. Somebody is owed and somebody owes. Rhonda has been keeping the books for twenty eight years, faithfully, in the dark, and she has never once asked the obvious question, which is who exactly is holding the other copy.

Not God. Romans 8:1 says there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and now is the word doing the work in that sentence, because it excludes Sunday night specifically.

Not the woman at the bus stop, who does not remember the conversation.

Not the man in the gym, who would be undone if he knew.

You have no creditor, and an account with nobody at the other end of it is not a debt, it is a habit. That is exactly what the written word means by no condemnation now, and the Spirit is the One who makes a courtroom word land in a brown chair at twenty to eleven, which is where the sentence was always headed.

And this is the part where I have to be careful with you, because the easy move now is to hand you a gentler system. Just be present. Just love people well. Just be authentic and let it flow naturally.

No. That is the same machine with a nicer paint job, and by next Sunday you will be adding up how present you were.

The sentence Jesus said on the hillside has no verb in it for you to perform. He said you are the light of the world. He did not attach a rate. He did not attach a minimum. He did not say some of you are and the rest have some catching up to do, and He said it to a crowd that had, that morning, converted nobody.

You are the light of the world, and there is no quota underneath that sentence, because there was never a verb in it to be graded on. Matthew 5:14 says ye are the light of the world, and there is no imperative anywhere in it; the verb is a plain statement of what is. The Spirit does not need you to work up a feeling about that. He is simply agreeing with a written line while you sit in the dark.