Still Failing a List I Wrote at Seventeen

She found it in a box of school things and read it standing up in her mother's loft.

Two sides of A4, in handwriting she recognized as her own before she recognized anything else about it. Written at a summer thing, on the last night, at seventeen, in the state seventeen year olds get into on the last night of a summer thing.

The kind of Christian I am going to be.

Fourteen points. Some of them are lovely. Some of them are extremely specific about things that turned out not to matter. Three of them are about how much she would read, one of them is about never being someone who complains, and one of them, which stopped her, says: never let it become normal.

She is forty-one.

And standing in that loft with the dust going about in the light from the little window, she understood two things at once, and the second one is the reason this message exists.

The first is that she has failed nearly all of it. That was not a surprise.

The second is that she has been marked against it every single day for twenty-four years without once being able to see the document.

That is the thing that got her. She has not read that piece of paper since the summer she wrote it. She could not have told you five of the fourteen points. And yet there has been a standard running in her the entire time, a sense of what she was supposed to be by now, and it has been the ache under every good Sunday and every hard week, and it turns out the standard was set by a seventeen year old on the last night of a camp.

Not by God. By a girl who had been up until two in the morning and meant every word.

She sat down on a box in that loft for quite a while.

And you may have your own two sides of A4. Yours may never have been written down at all, which makes it harder, because a document you have never seen is a document you can never answer.

There was a charge sheet, and the verse tells you exactly where it went

Take this off before anything else, because you have carried it twenty-four years and it was never yours.

You are not behind on who you were meant to be. You never were. Scripture describes a document with charges on it and then says plainly what was done with it, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your progress against a standard, who makes that real in a person. Set it down here on the box. It is heavy and it has been in your chest since that loft.

Now hear the sentence, and notice that it is about paperwork.

He forgave us all our sins, having cancelled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; He has taken it away, nailing it to the cross.Colossians 2:14

There is a document in that verse.

It has charges on it. It stood against us. It condemned us, which is a word about a verdict rather than a feeling.

And then there are three verbs, one after another, and every one of them is about removal. Canceled. Taken away. Nailed to the cross, which in that world meant a thing publicly finished, posted up where everybody could see that it had been dealt with.

Not amended. Not reduced. Not made achievable.

Gone.

And that includes every real charge against you, which is a great deal more serious than fourteen points a girl wrote at a camp. If the actual legal document went, the one in your handwriting has no standing whatsoever.

That is true of you right now, at forty-one, sitting on a box in a loft. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who applies it, and He has never once been consulted about the fourteen points.

Now let me be careful, because there is a ditch here and I am not putting you in it.

Nothing here is a criticism of the girl who wrote it. She was not silly. She was seventeen and she had just met something enormous and she wanted all of it, and never let it become normal is a better sentence than most adults manage. Do not be unkind to her.

And nothing here says the fourteen points were bad things to want. Several of them were good.

The point is only that a document that has been canceled cannot be failed, and you have been failing one for twenty-four years that God took down long before you found the box. Scripture says so plainly, and His Spirit is the one who makes it stand.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. What you have actually been grieving is not the reading plan, and His Spirit has known that the whole time.

It is her. The girl at two in the morning who thought it would all be like that. You have been marking yourself against her ever since and coming up short, and the truth is you were never in competition with her, and she would be astonished at what you have carried since.

His word says the charge was canceled and taken away and nailed up in public, and His Spirit is the one who makes that stand in a person, and neither of them has ever run your life against a piece of A4.