Eleven Times in Her Own Hand

The notebook is the sort with a soft cover and a band round it and she has had it about four years, and it is not a diary. She has never kept a diary. It is for the things she wants to say properly and cannot say out loud, and there are about sixty pages used.

Eleven of them are the same.

Not word for word. That is the part that unsettles her, actually. If they were word for word she could tell herself it was a devotional practice, a written liturgy, something people do. They are not. Each one is a fresh attempt, in her own handwriting, on a different day, in a different pen sometimes, at saying the same thing.

Bridget is forty six. She noticed the eleven in February, going back through for something else, and she sat on the floor with the book open on her knees for a while.

She has read them all now. The first one is from four years ago and it is the longest. The most recent is from the week before last and it is nine lines and much better written, and there is a phrase in it she is quietly rather pleased with, and she has never in her life felt worse about a sentence she was pleased with.

She believes she was forgiven the first time. She would say that flatly to anybody who asked.

If you have written a thing more than once, or said it more than once in any form, this is written for you. And I want to go very slowly through the order of one verse, because the order is the whole thing and almost nobody notices it.

Watch the order

Here is the verse.

I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the LORD; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin.

Now read the second sentence very slowly, because there is something in the order that the eye slides over.

I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the LORD.

That is the announcement of an intention. He is reporting the moment he decided. Not the confession itself. The decision to make it.

And thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin.

The forgiving is reported next, immediately, attached to the saying of the intention. David never actually gets round to describing the confession. It does not appear in the psalm. There is a decision, and then there is a forgiving, and the content of what he said is not recorded anywhere, and the psalm simply moves on.

So the forgiving in that verse arrives at the moment of turning, and not at the completion of an adequate account.

You were met at the turning rather than at the end of a satisfactory account, and the psalm never records the account at all. Psalm 32:5 attaches the forgiving to the decision and moves straight past the content, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written order and makes it real in a person, so this does not rest on how much of it lands on a floor with a book open.

Now I want to be careful, because a woman with eleven pages could hear that as a rebuke and it is nothing of the kind.

Nothing here forbids you to write it again. God is not weary of you and He has never once been impatient with a page. Write Him whatever you want, as often as you want, for the rest of your life, and if the eleventh was your best writing then so much the better.

What the verse removes is not the freedom. It removes the obligation. May and must, and this whole article lives in the gap between them.

You have had an obligation lifted rather than a practice criticized, and the two are not related. It is written as an order of events and not as an instruction against anybody who writes again, and His Spirit is the one carrying a lifted obligation into a life, which is why it holds on an afternoon with the book open on your knees.

Nobody is marking the drafts

There is something about eleven drafts that needs saying gently, because I think it is the actual weight.

Eleven attempts at the same thing is what a person does when they believe the attempt is being assessed.

Nobody redrafts something that has been received. A person redrafts when they suspect the earlier version was inadequate to its purpose, and inadequate to its purpose means, in this case, not good enough to have worked.

That is why the phrase she is pleased with felt so terrible. Because being pleased with the wording exposed what she had been quietly doing all along, which was writing to a standard.

And there is no standard here. There is no marker. The psalm does not record the words David used because the words were not the operative part, and if God had wanted a standard He would have given one, and He never has, anywhere.

You have never once been drafting to a standard, and no version of it was ever being assessed. Scripture omits the content of the confession entirely and reports only the turning and the forgiving, and the same Spirit at work in that psalm is the one testifying inside a person now.

Something belongs here in the middle where nobody can skip it. If the writing has grown into something that governs your weeks, if the nights have been getting long, or if the thinking has traveled out past regret toward wishing to be gone, get a person alongside you. Talk to your doctor. Sit down with a counselor. If today is a dark one, call or text 988 or your local crisis line and let another human being be with you in it. That is not a lesser road than prayer and it is not a fault in anybody's faith. God has always worked through people, and one sitting with you is part of what He is doing rather than an alternative to it.

The word after it

There is one more thing in that verse and it is not a word at all, or rather it is a word that most translations keep and nobody knows what to do with.

Selah.

It sits right after the forgiving. Whatever else it means, and people argue about it, everyone agrees it is a mark for a pause. A rest. A place where the music stops and the thing that has just been said is allowed to sit in the room without anything following it.

That is the instruction after the forgiving. Stop. Let it be there.

Not: now examine whether that took. Not: now compose a better version for next time. A pause, written into the text, immediately after the sentence that says the thing was forgiven.

You have a pause written into the text right where the forgiving lands, and nothing was scheduled to come after it. Psalm 32:5 puts a rest immediately after the forgiving clause, and the Spirit takes what is written and makes it living in a body.

I am not going to tell you there is no twelfth page. Four years of a habit goes at the pace it goes and if you write one next month it would not mean anything at all had failed. Anybody who hands you a date has invented it.

You are clean right now with the book still open on your knees, and page eleven changed nothing in either direction. It is written and it is forgiven, and it is His Spirit rather than the strength of your agreement who makes a forgiven thing real in a body.