Waiting Until I Have Caught Up

It is a sentence she has never said out loud and it runs about forty times a day.

When I have caught up.

Sorcha does not know when she started saying it. She is thirty-six and it is in everything. When she has caught up she will enjoy Sunday properly. When she has caught up she will let herself sit down with it in the mornings instead of doing the reading like a woman clearing a desk. When she has caught up she will stop having the feeling she gets on the way in through the door.

And in the spring she did something dangerous, which was to ask herself, on paper, what exactly she was behind on.

She sat there with a pen.

And she could not produce a list.

There is no set of things. There is no number of mornings missed, no debt of prayer, no specific failure with a date on it. There is nothing anybody has said to her, and nobody in that church would recognize the description if she gave it to them.

There is only an arrears. A general, permanent, undefined sense of being behind, which has been running since roughly her early twenties and has no ledger anywhere.

And she has been paying it down, quietly, for about fourteen years, by declining to enjoy anything.

That is the sentence she got to at the bottom of the page, and it took her another week to be able to look at it: she has been withholding her own gladness as a kind of installment.

She is not miserable. Nobody would say that about her. She laughs, she is good company, she is not walking around under a cloud where anybody can see it.

It is only that she has never once let herself be simply glad about God, and she has always assumed that permission arrives later, after the catching up, which has not happened in fourteen years and shows no sign of happening at all.

And you may know that sentence. Yours may be worded differently. It may be when I am back on track, or once things settle, and you may never have asked it what it means.

The verse closes the account and dates the closing

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it fourteen years and it was never yours.

You are not in arrears. You never were. Scripture states the position and dates it, and the date is not in your future, and it is the Holy Spirit, not any catching up, who makes that real in a person. Set it down here on the step. It is heavy, and there was never a ledger under it.

Now hear the sentence, and hear the word at the end of it.

Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.Romans 8:1

Now.

Not eventually. Not once the account is square. Not when a person has had a run of better months. Now, which is a word about the present and was written to be read by somebody in exactly your position.

And notice that the verse does not tell you to feel differently about your record. It states a fact about your standing.

There is no condemnation. Not less of it. None, which is a total, and there is no arrangement whereby a portion is held back against future improvement.

That is your position right now, at thirty-six, on an ordinary morning, with the sentence still running. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who makes it live, and He has never once operated a payment plan.

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

Nothing here says wanting to be more consistent is a fault, or that the mornings do not matter. They do. Scripture is full of people who wanted to walk more closely and said so, and that is a good want and His Spirit is the one who put it in you.

And nothing here says you have been faking the laughter or that fourteen years were miserable. They were not. You have had a good life and God has been in a great deal of it.

The point is only that the arrears has no ledger, and a debt with no ledger cannot ever be cleared, which is why fourteen years has produced no permission.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is kind about it. You are not withholding gladness because you think God is withholding it, and His Spirit knows exactly why you are.

You are doing it because being glad feels like claiming something, and claiming something feels unsafe while you are behind, and so the gladness has become the one thing you can hold back to show you are taking it seriously.

That is not repentance and it was never asked of you. Scripture says there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ, and His Spirit is the one who applies that word, and neither of them ever suggested you pay in installments of your own joy.