The Debt I Kept a List Of

There is a page in the second drawer of the desk with eleven dates on it and a figure beside each one, and I wrote every line of it myself over about six years.

It is money. A man borrowed and did not repay and borrowed again, and I lent every time and he repaid about a third of it in total, and none of the individual amounts are large and the whole of it comes to something that matters on this farm.

I did not start the list as a grievance. I want to be fair to myself about the first two entries. A man who lends money and does not write it down is a man who cannot remember what he lent, and I have a boy to feed and a farm that runs on margins, and writing down a date and a figure is what a sensible person does.

Entries three to eleven are not that. I know exactly what they are and so does anybody who has kept one.

By about entry six I was not recording, I was building. I would write the date and I would sit with the page for a moment afterward, and the sitting with it is the part that gives the whole thing away, because nobody sits with an inventory of feed.

Toby found it once. He was looking for a pencil and he came out with the page in his hand and asked me what it was, and I said it was a note about some money, and he said, oh, and put it back, and I stood in that room and heard how I had said it.

The list did not make him repay anything. That is the practical fact underneath all of this and it is worth saying plainly: eleven entries over six years and not one dollar of it came back because of the page.

What the page did is keep the whole business current. Every single entry made the thing new again on a particular date, and I have a written record of six years of a man being ashamed to look at me in a shop.

I burned it in the stove in the front room on an ordinary evening in November with Toby doing something at the table and Bucky asleep against the door where he is not supposed to be. It took about four seconds and the room smelled of it for a minute.

He still owes it. That has not changed. I no longer know the number and that is the whole difference.

Four verbs and one measure

Jesus gives four instructions in two verses and attaches the same thing to each of them.

Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven: Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again. (Luke 6:37, 38)

With the same measure. The picture is a market. A measure was a physical container, and the same container gets used both ways, and a man who used a tight measure on other people had a tight measure used on him.

That is not a threat about God being petty. It is a description of a container a person is holding. A narrow one narrows everything that goes through it, including what comes in.

You are holding a container rather than being punished by one, and Luke 6:38 makes it a measure a person uses. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as a mechanism rather than as a warning.

The verb translated forgive in that verse is a word about releasing, letting go of a hold. It is the ordinary word for wiping out a debt, and Luke would have used it in a market as easily as in a sermon.

You have not been asked to feel anything about a page in a drawer. The written word uses a release word rather than a feeling word, and His Spirit is what makes releasing something possible on an ordinary evening in November.

What a kept list becomes

The parable Jesus tells about a servant with a debt has a detail in it that is easy to miss, and it is about time.

But the same servant went out, and found one of his fellowservants, which owed him an hundred pence. (Matthew 18:28)

Found one of his fellowservants. He went out and he found him. That man was not standing in his path. Somebody who has been released from an unpayable sum goes looking for a specific person, which means he knew the amount, which means he had it somewhere.

A hundred pence is about a hundred days of wages. It is a real debt and it is also a number small enough to be carried in a head, and the whole engine of that parable is a man who kept a figure current while a much larger one was being wiped out behind him.

You are carrying a number and standing inside a release at the same time, and Matthew 18:28 puts both of those in one man. The Spirit of God is what makes remembering the second one possible without pretending about the first.

And there is a line in the psalms about what God does with His own records that is worth putting next to a page in a drawer.

If thou, LORD, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared. (Psalm 130:3, 4)

Mark is a bookkeeping word. The psalmist is describing a ledger that God has chosen not to keep, and the reason given for the reverence at the end is the forgiveness rather than the record.

You have been dealt with by somebody who declined to keep the page. Psalm 130:3 asks who could stand if He kept one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from a psalm into a drawer with a stove in the same room.