The Notebook of Principles

The kitchen is the best room in the house at half past eleven, because it is the only one where the light does not go under a door and wake anybody.

He sits at the corner of the table with the notebook. It is the third notebook. The first two he copied across, because the numbering had gone wrong and he wanted it clean, and copying them across took two evenings and felt, both evenings, like progress.

He is on forty one. Number one is about honesty. Number seven is about not spending out of fear. Number twenty two he wrote after a sermon and has never fully understood since. Number thirty eight is crossed out and rewritten twice.

He reads them back most nights. And most nights he arrives at the bottom of the page with the same flat feeling, because the list is good and nothing has changed, and there is only one explanation that his mind will accept at half past eleven: there is one he has not got yet. Forty two. The one that makes the other forty one work. Somebody has it. It is in a book he has not read or a talk he has not heard, and until he finds it, this family stays exactly where it is.

His daughter came down once, at about this hour, in the pajamas with the stars on. She wanted water and she wanted it from the tap, not the jug, which is a whole position she holds. And he closed the notebook before she got to the table. He has thought about that a lot since. He does not know why he closed it. He only knows he did not want her to see him looking.

You know that table. Maybe yours is a folder of saved videos, or a highlighted book, or a habit of listening to teaching at one and a half times speed on the drive so you can get through more of it. Maybe your list is not written down anywhere, and you would say you were simply learning, and you would half believe it. But there is a number forty two somewhere in your head, and the reason it will not let go is that you have made it responsible for your family.

Sit back from the table. Leave the pen down. I want to tell you what Jesus said out loud, in public, about who gets given the thing.

There is no code, and He hands it to children

Let me say it plainly before we go one line further, because the name over the door of this site promises a secret and I am not going to let a tired man read on in hope of one.

There is no code. There is no principle forty two. There is no arrangement of steps about money or about anything else that God is keeping until you have proved you are serious. Scripture is not a system with a missing component, and if it were, then God would be the kind of Father who watches a man copy out a notebook twice and says nothing, and I have sat at His table, and He is not that Father.

Here is what Jesus actually said, in the open, in the middle of a hard day, and it is stranger than any system.

I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.Matthew 11:25

Read the direction of it. There is a hiding in that sentence, but look who it is hidden from. Not from the ordinary. Not from the poor. Not from a man at a kitchen table at half past eleven who cannot make his life come out right. It is hidden from the posture that arrives expecting to work it out, and it is handed, freely and completely, to the ones with no qualifications at all. The word is babes. Children. The people who cannot earn anything and know it.

You are not one principle away from being given something, and there is nothing waiting on your understanding to catch up. That is not a kindness I have arranged for the end of a long day. It is written into Matthew 11, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence Jesus prayed out loud and lays it across a notebook at a kitchen table.

You have a Father who reveals rather than tests, and He has already turned toward you tonight. Scripture says the Son reveals Him to whom He will, and the same Spirit who moved a Galilean to thank His Father out loud is in the room where the kettle has gone cold.

Now let me say the true thing under all of it, because a man does not copy a notebook out twice for intellectual reasons.

You closed the book when your daughter came down. That is the whole article, really. You closed it because somewhere in you the searching feels like an admission, and the admission is: I have not got what my family needs and I am trying to find it before anybody notices. That is love. It is love that has been given a job it was never meant to hold, which is the job of being the one who works out the system. And it has been quietly turning into shame, and shame is what makes a man hide a notebook from a seven year old.

You are not the reason your house is where it is, and no line in that notebook was ever load bearing. Scripture says that every good gift comes down from the Father of lights, coming down rather than being climbed to, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written word and puts it under a man like a floor.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because none of this shifts by being agreed with silently at midnight. Jesus said that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, moves what a hundred good intentions never move. So say it out loud, in your own kitchen, where nobody is awake to hear. You have the standing to speak to a lie at your own table and tell it what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that your position and not your achievement, and the Holy Spirit carries a spoken word further than the walls of a small house.