The Note From School in My Coat Pocket

Mrs. Cardew gave me a note on a Monday. It was folded twice and it had my dad's name on the front of it in her writing, and it was about a thing I had said to another boy in the yard.

I am not going to write down what I said. I will say that it was true, and that it was mean, and that those two things going together is the exact reason it was worth a note.

I put it in my coat pocket. That is all I did. I did not lose it and I did not throw it in the creek, which I thought about on the bridge on the way home and did not do, and I have thought since about why I did not do it, and I think it is because throwing it away would have been a decision and putting it in a pocket was not.

Six days.

I want to describe what six days does, because grown-ups say things get easier and this got worse every single day and it got worse in a way that was very orderly.

Day one it was a note. Day two it was a note I had not given him yet. By day four it was a note I had deliberately not given him for four days, which is a different object entirely, and by day six the note was the smallest part of the whole thing and the six days were the rest of it.

I wore that coat every day. I put my hand in that pocket about forty times.

On the Sunday Bucky ate the sleeve of it off the hook by the door, which he has done to two other coats, and the coat went on the table for mending and my dad went through the pockets the way you do.

He read it. And then he sat down on the arm of the chair and asked me how long it had been in there.

I said six days. He did not say anything about the six days. What he said was: that must have been a heavy coat.

The sentence, and who He said it to

The verse is often quoted as a warning to people who are getting away with something, and the context is nearly the opposite of that.

For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known. (Luke 12:2)

He says it to His own disciples, in a crowd so large that people are treading on each other, and the sentence just before it is about hypocrisy being like leaven, and the sentence just after it is about how what they say in the dark will be heard in the light.

He is telling frightened people that concealment is not a permanent condition of the universe. That reads as a threat to somebody hiding something and as an enormous relief to somebody tired of hiding it.

Both are the same fact. Which one it is depends entirely on how tired a person is of carrying it.

You are living in a world where hiding is temporary by design, and Luke 12:2 says so without any menace in the sentence. It is the Holy Spirit who decides whether that arrives as a threat or as a door.

And four verses later, in the same speech, He says the thing that tells you the tone He meant it in: ye are of more value than many sparrows.

You have not been addressed by somebody who is trying to catch you out. Luke 12:7 puts the value line in the middle of the warning passage, and His Spirit is what makes the whole speech read in the voice it was said in.

What the carrying actually costs

There is a psalm that describes carrying something in physical terms, and the description is oddly precise about time.

For mine iniquities are gone over mine head: as an heavy burden they are too heavy for me. (Psalm 38:4)

Too heavy for me. Not too heavy in general. Too heavy for the person carrying it, which is a different and more honest claim, and it is the claim a child would make if a child had the words.

And there is a line about relief in a different psalm that says what the release feels like rather than what it accomplishes: Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.

Notice who does the covering in that one. Not the person. Covered is passive there, and the whole difference between Psalm 32 and a coat pocket is who is doing the covering.

You are not the one who has to keep anything covered, and Psalm 32:1 puts that verb in somebody else's hands. The Spirit of God is what makes the difference between a covering that has to be maintained and one that has already been done.

You have been carrying a weight that was never assigned to you. Psalm 38:4 says too heavy for me in the plainest words a person has, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that off a page and into a coat on a hook.