The Last Page of the Notebook

He is a man who writes things down, and that is not a hobby, it is how he is built.

One spiral notebook at a time, front to back, in pen, dated. What the water heater cost and who fitted it. The mileage every time he fills up. The day the furnace was serviced and the name of the man who did the gutters and what he charged and whether he would have him back. When one is full he puts it in the kitchen drawer with the batteries and the tape measure and the takeout menus, and starts another.

He opens that drawer three or four times a week. Batteries, mostly.

And in one of those notebooks, four years old now, there is a line that is not like any of the others. It is not in the run of entries. He turned the notebook over and wrote it on the last page, from the back, so it would sit by itself with nothing after it.

A date. And under the date, five words.

He wrote it the night he stopped asking.

There was no scene. He did not shout at anybody. He was not angry at God, and if you told him he was he would say no, honestly, and mean it. What happened was quieter than that and harder to say. He had asked about the same thing in his own body for a long time. He had asked well and he had asked badly and he had asked at three in the morning and he had asked in a church parking lot, and every time he asked, something in him got its hopes up half an inch, and every time nothing came, that half inch came out of him.

And one night at the kitchen table he found he had nothing left to pay with. So, being a man who writes things down, he wrote down that he had stopped. Closed the notebook. Put it in the drawer.

It has been in there ever since, under the menus, and he has opened that drawer several hundred times since for batteries, and never once taken it out.

That is you, perhaps, at your own drawer. There is a subject you closed. Maybe you did not write it down, because most people do not, but you know the week it happened, and you know what you would have written. And you are not angry, and you have not stopped believing anything, and you would be embarrassed to make it sound bigger than it is. You just do not go there any more, and part of you is fairly sure that after this long you would not be welcome anyway.

The other book

Malachi is written to people who had run out. That is the setting, and it is worth knowing before you read the verse, because it puts the verse in the right room.

They had said, out loud, that serving God had turned out to be pointless. The wording in the book is blunter than most of us would dare to be. And then, in the middle of that, a small thing happens that nobody would have written down: a few of them simply spoke to each other about Him. That is all. A conversation, at somebody's table, between people who had very little left.

Then they that feared the LORD spake often one to another: and the LORD hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the LORD, and that thought upon his name.Malachi 3:16

A book of remembrance, written before Him.

Stay with that, because it is the strangest and kindest detail in the chapter. While they were saying it was pointless, somebody was writing. There was a record being kept on the other side of the room the whole time, and not one of those people knew it was open, and none of them had asked for it, and it had their names in it.

You have a notebook in a drawer with a date on the last page. There is another notebook. It was open during the four years yours was closed, and God is the one who kept it, and He did not put your silence in it as a charge.

You are written about in a book you never asked anybody to keep, and it was open the whole time yours was in the drawer. Malachi 3:16 says so in plain words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line written for discouraged people long ago and lays it on a kitchen drawer this morning.

What the silence was and what it was not

Now let me say what your four years were, and refuse what they get called.

They were not unbelief. I will not have the word used here. A man who has stopped asking about a thing has usually asked about it more than the people telling him to try again. He did not stop because he thought little of God; he stopped because every ask cost him something real and he ran out of the ability to pay it. That is exhaustion, and exhaustion is not a sin, and Scripture is full of tired people who are handled gently.

And it was not a failure of faith either. Nobody in this room is short of enough faith, and nothing has been held back from you for want of it. That sentence is not in the book, it is not true, and it has closed more drawers than it has ever opened.

So both halves, said in one breath, because a page carrying a name like this one would be a liar if it dropped either. God heals. I will not soften that: He heals, He heals bodies, it is His character and not a rumor, and Scripture never apologizes for it. And I do not promise you the result. I cannot and I will not, not today and not on the day you ask again. We say what He has already said, and He sends the current, and anybody who tells you they know what happens next in your body is speaking past what they were given. Keep your appointments and keep the people caring for you; the God who hears you is not in competition with them.

And here is what I am not going to do, and hold me to it. I am not going to ask you to promise you will keep asking. Not today, not tomorrow, not as a condition of anything. That is exactly the kind of debt that closed the drawer in the first place. One sentence, once, is a whole thing on its own, and if it turns out to be the only one, it is still a whole thing.

You have a way back to a subject you closed, and it was already open before you thought about it. Malachi 3:16 shows Him listening to a conversation nobody staged for Him, and it is His Spirit who makes a sentence said at a kitchen drawer as real as one said in a full building.

One more thing, and I mean it. If the years have taken you somewhere darker than tired, if you have caught yourself thinking everybody would have a lighter time of it without you, tell one living human being today and not tomorrow. In the United States, call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one person who can sit with you tonight. A page cannot do that part. You deserve a person in the room, and there is nothing shameful in it.