The Page With Two Columns

The dishwasher has reached the loud part of its cycle, and it is twenty past nine on a Thursday.

The kitchen table is cleared except for a placemat she never moved, a mug of decaf going cold on a coaster, a good pen, a yellow highlighter she has not needed yet, and the workbook. Week four. There are two backpacks slumped against the wall by the door and a permission slip on the refrigerator held up by a magnet shaped like a strawberry. Upstairs a shower runs and then stops.

She likes this workbook. That is what makes tonight annoying. She has done the reading, she has looked up every reference, she has written in the margins in her small square handwriting, and she has been genuinely glad to be doing it. Then she turned the page and found the exercise.

At the top it says Before and After. Underneath there are two columns ruled down the middle of the page, and above them, in a friendly font, it says take your time with this one.

She fills the left column without much trouble, because she is an honest woman and she was not a saint at twenty. Impatient. Anxious about money in a way that made her unkind. Sharp with her sister for most of a decade. Quick to keep score. She writes six things and looks at them and does not feel especially condemned, because she brought all six of them to God years ago and she knows what He said about them.

Then she moves the pen across the ruled line and sets the tip down at the top of the right column.

And nothing comes. Not nothing as in she cannot think of anything worth writing. Nothing as in the honest sentence forming in her head is: still impatient, still anxious about money, better with her sister but not by much, and still keeping score, only more quietly. She sits with the pen touching the paper long enough to make a small blue dot, and the dishwasher changes gear, and the shower upstairs comes on again, and she thinks the thought she has been walking around for a long time now: if somebody asked me what is different, I would not know what to say.

She caps the pen. She closes the workbook with the pen inside it to hold the place, which she will regret, because it will crack the spine.

You know the page. Yours might be a question at a table, or a form, or a friend asking kindly over coffee what God has been doing. And you know the pen touching the paper and going nowhere, and the sentence underneath it that you would not say out loud in a group: that you can see the left column perfectly well from here, and the right one is where you keep running out of things to say.

Every verb in that promise is His

Let me put a verse next to that page, because the two of them are asking completely different questions.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.Ezekiel 36:26

Count the verbs. I will give. I will put. I will take away. I will give. Four of them, and every single one of them belongs to God, and not one of them belongs to the person He is talking to. There is no clause in that sentence about maintaining anything. There is no participation required in the grammar. It is one party doing four things to another party, and the other party is the one being worked on.

You are the object of that sentence rather than its subject, and you were the object of it before you ever opened a workbook. That is what is written, in the plain grammar of Ezekiel 36:26, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old promise about a stony heart and puts it on a kitchen table at half past nine, which is how He has always handled the word.

So look again at the page. The exercise asks her to audit herself. The promise audits Him. And when a person with an honest pen tries to fill a column that God reserved for His own work, the pen is going to stop, and stopping is not a failure of the woman holding it.

The heart is the one thing nobody can photograph

Here is the second thing that page cannot do, and it is not the page's fault.

The new thing named in that verse is a heart. Not a habit. Not a schedule. Not a temper. A heart, which is the one organ nobody in your house has ever seen, including you. When Samuel went to anoint a king, God told him plainly that man looks on the outward appearance but the Lord looks on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the workbook has only the outward appearance available to it. It is not lying to you. It is just holding the wrong instrument.

You have a new thing described in a place you cannot inspect, and it is already His to see and His to keep. Scripture says He looks where we cannot, and it is His Spirit, not anybody's self assessment, who bears witness about what He has done inside a person.

And notice what the promise does not say. It does not say the temper goes on Tuesday. It does not say the anxiety about money lifts in year three. It does not offer a timetable at all, which means nobody is behind on one. What it says is that the stone comes out and flesh goes in, and flesh means a heart that can be moved, softened, grieved, warmed, reached. Stone cannot do any of that. Stone stays exactly the same temperature as the room.

What a stone would have done with that page

So sit at the table with me for a second and think about what stone actually does.

Stone does not sit up at nine twenty on a Thursday with a workbook open. Stone does not care about a blank column. Stone is not bothered by an honest answer, does not look up references in the margins, does not want to be different from how it is, does not close a book gently because it minds. A woman minding is a woman with something in her that can mind.

I am not going to tell you what that settles, because that is God's to settle and He does not need me announcing verdicts at your table. I will only say what the verse says: the heart He gives is a heart of flesh, and flesh feels things, and grief over an empty column is a thing being felt.

You are being dealt with by God at that table and not audited by Him, and you were being dealt with all through week one, two and three. It is written that He who began a good work will keep at it (Philippians 1:6), a sentence about His persistence rather than your rate of progress, and the same Spirit who moved over the water at the beginning is moving over the part of this that nobody can see.

And the left column, the one that filled up so easily? Read it again. Every one of those six items is a thing she can now name calmly, in her own handwriting, without flinching. Ten years ago she could not have written sharp with my sister for a decade on a piece of paper in a lit kitchen. The change she is looking for is partly in the hand doing the writing.

You have a candor that came from somewhere, and it is already the fruit of a work you did not perform on yourself. The word says the truth makes people free, and it is the Spirit of truth, not a good week, who gets a person to the place where they can write the plain thing down and leave it there.