The Receipt I Kept to Punish Myself

It is in the drawer with the batteries and the takeaway menus and the little screwdriver, and it has been there for four years, and it has gone the color that thermal paper goes.

You cannot even read the amount any more. That is what he noticed last month. The figure has faded almost to nothing. But he does not need to read it, because he knows it, and the paper is not there to be read.

The thing itself does not matter much now. A program, a system, a set of sessions, bought at a moment when things at work were uncertain and he wanted to feel like he was doing something. He did about half of it. It was not evil. It was simply nothing, and the nothing cost what it cost.

He got a refund window and did not use it, which is its own small chapter.

And every time he opens that drawer for a battery he sees it, and something happens that takes about a second and a half, and then he takes the battery and shuts the drawer.

If you asked him why he keeps it he would say something about records, or being able to check the date, or a vague idea about tax. None of that is true and he knows none of it is true.

He keeps it because a man who has done something like that ought to have to look at it. That is the actual reason. It is a fine he pays himself, in installments of a second and a half, several times a month, for four years.

And he would call that being responsible.

You know that drawer. Yours might be a folder you do not delete, or a photograph you keep, or a piece of paper in a book. And you would give a practical reason for it, and the practical reason is not the reason, and somewhere in you there is a court that has never adjourned.

Come and sit down. Let us clear this table off first, and then I want to say one line to you and it is very short.

There is no code, and there is a now

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over the door of this site promises a secret and I am not going to add another receipt to your drawer.

There is no code. There was nothing in that program, and there is no version of the four years in which finishing it would have changed anything.

And I am not going to hand you relief by turning whoever made it into a criminal. I do not know them. A peace built out of somebody else's guilt has to be maintained, and you already have one thing in this house that requires maintaining.

Here is the line. It is eleven words in most translations and it starts with the word that matters.

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.Romans 8:1

Now.

Not eventually. Not once enough time has passed. Not after a suitable period of looking at a piece of paper in a drawer. The sentence is in the present tense and it was in the present tense four years ago and it is in the present tense while you are standing in your kitchen with a battery in your hand.

And read the word condemnation properly, because it is a legal word. It does not mean God is not cross with you. It means there is no verdict outstanding. There is no case. The court that you have been keeping open in a kitchen drawer is not sitting anywhere in heaven, and it has not been sitting for four years, and the paper in there is not evidence in any proceedings that exist.

You are not under a sentence, and the only court with jurisdiction over you closed this case before you ever opened that drawer. That is not a soft reading I have arranged over a table. It is what Romans 8 says and it is where Paul chooses to begin the whole chapter, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a legal word and lays it on a faded piece of thermal paper.

You have no condemnation, and the word attached to it is now. Scripture says there is therefore now no condemnation, and His Spirit is the one who makes a present tense into an actual present rather than a doctrine you would agree with.

Now let me name the true thing, because I am not going to lift you over it.

The receipt is not about money and it is barely about the program. It is about a man who felt, at a particular moment, that things were slipping, and who did something to feel like he had a hand on it. That is what you bought. Not sessions. A feeling of not being helpless in a bad month at work.

And the reason you have punished yourself for four years is that reaching for that felt like weakness, and weakness is the thing you were raised to have no room for.

You are not weak for having reached for something, and there is no version of a man who never once wants a hand on the wheel. Scripture says that He knoweth our frame, He remembereth that we are dust, which is God describing the whole species with tenderness rather than contempt, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line like that and lets a man stop fining himself.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because a drawer does not empty because somebody was decent to you at a table. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what serving a sentence never does. So speak, out loud, in your own kitchen. You have the standing to speak to a court you convened yourself 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 conduct, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word further than a kitchen door.