I Forgave Him and Then I Wanted It Back

On the Tuesday I said it was all right about the wheelbarrow and I meant it, and on the Wednesday morning I woke up and wanted to be cross about the wheelbarrow.

I should explain that the wheelbarrow was not mine. It was the one I am allowed to use, which as far as I am concerned is the same thing, and Bucky got the front wheel off it in a way that nobody has ever explained.

Tuesday I did the whole thing properly. I said it out loud, and I did not do it in a sulky voice, and afterward I felt a specific lightness that I would recognize again anywhere and which I would like to have more often.

Wednesday I woke up and it was back. Not as bad. But it was there before breakfast and it was in the same place and it had the same shape.

And what worried me about it was not being cross. It was the question of whether Tuesday had counted. Because if I could just want it back the next morning then either I had not really done it on Tuesday, which would mean I had lied out loud, or I had done it and it had come undone, which would mean the whole business does not work.

I did not ask anybody about it for about a week because I could not work out how to say it.

When I did ask, my dad said something that I did not expect at all. He said it happens to him every single time, and that he is fifty, and that he has never once forgiven anybody and had it stay put on the first morning after.

I asked what he does. He said he does it again. He said it takes about four seconds the second time and about one second the fourth time, and that he has done one particular thing perhaps two hundred times over about eleven years and would do it again tomorrow if it turned up.

I asked whether that meant the first time did not work. And he said no. He said that a thing sent away can come back to the door, and coming to the door is not the same as being let in.

The distance was picked on purpose

The psalm makes a claim about where sins go and the geography in it is not decorative.

As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us. (Psalm 103:12)

The obvious pair would have been north and south, and north and south is the wrong answer, because a person walking north eventually reaches a pole and starts going south. North and south is a distance that closes.

East and west never meet. A person going east goes east forever. The psalmist picked the only pair on a globe that does not have an end in it, and he did it deliberately.

You are looking at a distance that has no meeting point in it, and Psalm 103:12 chose the one pair on the map that never closes. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that geography a comfort rather than a curiosity.

And the verb is removed, which is a thing done by somebody to something. It is not a description of the thing fading. Somebody carried it off.

You have not been left waiting for anything to wear off. The written word puts an active removal in God's hands, and His Spirit is what makes that a settled fact rather than a process a person is monitoring.

Coming to the door is not being let in

Here is the part that I think children need and that adults do not say, because adults have all had the Wednesday and most of them think they are the only one.

The Bible is full of people doing the same thing more than once and it is never treated as a failure of the first time.

Seven times a day do I praise thee because of thy righteous judgments. (Psalm 119:164)

Seven times a day, about the same thing. Nobody reads that verse and concludes that the first praise did not take.

And Jesus told the disciples a parable about a widow who kept going back to a judge, and Luke tells us at the front what the parable was for: that men ought always to pray, and not to faint.

Repetition, in Scripture, is not evidence that something failed. It is the ordinary shape of a person living in time.

You are allowed to do the same thing again without it meaning the first time was fake. Luke 18:1 makes going back again the point of a whole parable, and the Spirit of God is what makes repetition read as faithfulness rather than as failure.

You have somewhere to take it every single morning it turns up. Psalm 103:12 is written in the past tense about the removing and does not put a limit on how often a person may read it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from a verse into a Wednesday before breakfast.