The List I Kept in the Notes App

It is called Notes and it has no other title, and it is the fourth one down, under a shopping list and two things she cannot remember writing.

It starts eleven years ago with a pair of school shoes. Then the winter coat, the year it went properly cold. Then the trip in year six that she paid for in three installments and told the school office she was fine about. Then a bike. Then, further down, a set of entries in a row from one particular autumn that she does not read any more, she just scrolls past them.

Twenty three entries. Each with a date. Each with a figure.

The children are seventeen and fourteen now. Nobody is claiming anything. That season is over legally and practically and she knows it. The shoes have been outgrown four times.

But the list is still there.

She opens it, she would guess, once every few weeks, usually late, usually after a day when she has been the only adult in the house for the ninth day running. She reads down it. She does not add it up. And then she puts the phone face down on the counter and stands in her own kitchen with her jaw set, and then she goes to bed.

Her seventeen year old said something in the summer, quite lightly, about how his dad is not that bad, and she said, no, he is not, and went and unloaded the dishwasher for the second time that day.

You know that list. Yours might be in a drawer, or on a bank app you scroll back through, or simply held in your head with the accuracy of a ledger. And you know the specific loneliness of holding a record that nobody else in the world has ever seen, on behalf of children who were never told, about a person they love.

Come and sit down. Let the music go on in the other room. I want to show you the shortest letter in the New Testament, because there is a sentence in it that somebody wrote in their own handwriting.

There is no code, and there is a man who wrote put it on mine

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over this door promises a secret and I am not going to hold a tired woman with a hint of one.

There is no code. Nothing in Scripture makes eleven years of unpaid school shoes come back, and nothing in this message is a technique for getting it. And I will say the second thing straight out, because women get preached at badly here: nothing in this asks you to give up anything lawful that you or your children are entitled to. If something is still owed and still claimable, it stays claimable. We are dealing with a list in a phone, and the list has not been claimable for years, and it is not doing what you think it is doing.

Now. There is a letter in the New Testament that is one page long. A runaway servant is going back to the man he ran from, and Paul, who is old and in prison and has no money at all, writes ahead of him.

If he hath wronged thee, or oweth thee ought, put that on mine account; I Paul have written it with mine own hand, I will repay it.Philemon 1:18-19

Look at what that is. A debt exists. Paul does not pretend it does not, and he does not minimize it, and he does not say it was probably a misunderstanding. He says: if there is anything, transfer it. Move it off his page and onto mine, and here is my handwriting so you know I mean it.

Somebody stood between two people and took a number onto himself so a relationship could go on existing.

And Paul learned that somewhere. He did not invent it. He is doing, in one letter, on one page, the thing that was done for him on a much larger scale, by somebody who took an account nobody could settle and wrote it onto His own.

You are not the one who has to hold this account, and there is somebody who has already asked for it to be transferred. That is not a comfort I have arranged for a woman at a counter. It is written into the letter to Philemon, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line written in an old man's own hand and lays it beside twenty three entries in a phone.

You have a God who takes things onto His own account, and He has never once handed one back. Scripture says He blotteth out our transgressions for His own sake, and His Spirit is the one who takes a written line and makes it a thing a woman can actually let go of at eleven at night.

Now let me say the true thing, because the money is not what is keeping that list on your phone.

The list is the only witness. That is what it is. There is no other record anywhere in the world that says what those eleven years cost you, because the children could not be told, and your mother would have said something unhelpful, and your friends were tired of it by about year three. So you kept the file. Every entry is a small stone laid down to say: this happened, and I was the one who paid for it, and somebody ought to know.

Somebody does. That is the whole point. There has been a witness the entire time, and it was never that phone.

You were never unwitnessed, and every one of those twenty three entries was seen as it happened. Scripture says He telleth our wanderings and putteth our tears into His bottle, and asks, are they not in Thy book, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an image like that and lets a woman put her jaw down.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because eleven years of a file does not close because somebody was kind to you in a kitchen. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what quiet keeping never does. So say it out loud in your own house. You have the standing to speak to a record you have kept and tell it what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that yours by position rather than by everything you have survived, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word much further than a kitchen counter.