The Box I Could Not Fill In

The box is about a centimetre high and beside it, in small gray type, it says: Faith (optional).

She is in the pre-admission clinic on the second floor, on one of those chairs that is bolted to the next chair, with a clipboard on her knees and a biro on a string. She has already done the easy part. Next of kin. Allergies. The two operations in the nineties. Height, and a weight she rounded down by four pounds because everybody does.

And then there is the box.

For thirty-one years she would have filled that box in without looking at it, the way you write your own postcode. She could have done it upside down and in the dark. It was on the tea rota. It was printed on her mother's order of service. It was the answer to a question that nobody in her family had ever had to sit and think about.

Then there were four years she does not particularly want to go into here. Not a scandal. Nothing anybody would put in a paper. A disagreement that turned into a silence, and one Sunday she did not go, and then a run of them, and somewhere in the middle of it the words she had always used came apart in her hands one at a time. The last one to go was the one that used to go in the box.

So she holds the biro over it.

She writes the first letter. Looks at it. Turns the pen round and rubs it out with the little gray eraser on the end, and the paper goes furry.

And a nurse comes past and says, brightly, would you like the chaplain to pop in on the day, and she hears her own voice say, oh, no thank you, I'm fine, and she is smiling while she says it, and the nurse says lovely, and takes the clipboard away with the furry patch on it.

She gets to her car and does not start it for eleven minutes.

Because the honest answer was not no. The honest answer was: I would not know what to tell him I was. He would ask me one gentle question and I would have nothing at all to put in his hand. Thirty-five years, and I could not tell you, this afternoon, in a hospital car park, what I would still stake anything on.

And now I am going to stop saying she.

Because you have a version of that box. Maybe it is an actual form. Maybe it is your brother at a table asking a perfectly reasonable question, or a colleague who says so what are you, then, and means nothing by it. Maybe it is only the question you ask yourself at four in the morning when there is nobody to perform for.

And underneath it, unsaid, is the thing that actually frightens you: that if you sat down and wrote out the list of what you are still sure of, it would be humiliatingly short, and a short list must mean you have lost the whole thing.

Paul answers with a Person

There is a letter written by a man in a cell.

Not a stage, not a crowd. A chain, and an old man on the end of it, and in the same letter he mentions, almost in passing, that everybody in the province of Asia has turned their face away from him. His people. The ones he taught.

If ever a man had reason to steady himself by reciting the full contents of everything he was certain about, it is that man on that afternoon. And here is what he actually writes.

For this reason I suffer these things. But I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have trusted, and I am persuaded that He is able to guard what I have placed in His keeping, for that day.2 Timothy 1:12

Read it again slowly, because there is one word in it that changes the whole exercise you have been failing at. And read it as what it is: the Holy Spirit put that line into the hand of a man in a chain, and He is the one holding it open in front of you this afternoon.

He does not say I know what I have believed. He says whom.

Not a subject. A Person. A face he could pick out of a room. Everything had gone except an acquaintance, and it turns out that an acquaintance was never the small version of the thing. It was the thing.

And then the second half, which is the half nobody quotes. He is persuaded that God is able to guard what he placed in God's keeping. Look at who is holding it. Paul is not holding it. Paul handed it over, and the whole weight of that letter rests on the strength of the hands it went into, and not on the strength of the man who let go of it.

Which means the length of Paul's list was never what was keeping Paul.

Now here is what I think has been happening to you, and I say it gently, because you have been failing an examination that nobody actually set.

You have been trying to write an inventory of what you could defend. That is a different exercise altogether from naming what is holding you up, and it is much, much harder, and it has almost nothing to do with faith. A thing can be carrying your entire weight at four in the morning and you would still lose an argument about it to a clever twenty-two year old. That does not make it less load bearing. It makes you a bad debater, which is not a sin, and half the saints were terrible at it. And you are not failing at faith, because what is written in 2 Timothy 1 is not an inventory a man could defend, it is a Person he knew, and the Holy Spirit who moved him to put that down is the same Spirit sitting in the passenger seat of your car.

What belongs on your list is not mine to tell you. Not one item of it.

That is not me being coy. It is not mine to write. A list handed to you by somebody else, however true every line of it happened to be, is precisely the sort of thing that came apart in your hands during those four years, and I would be doing the same thing to you again in a kinder voice. What is still load bearing in you is between you and God and nobody else is qualified to be in the room.

Nor is there any number here that you are supposed to reach. A short list is not a demotion and it is not a badge. There is no length at which you become impressive and no length at which you become a disappointment, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Nobody is counting. Nobody has ever been counting.

You are held today at whatever length your list actually is, and that is not me being nice to you. It is what His word keeps doing with small things: a mustard seed, two coins, five loaves, not one of them weighed before it was honored. And what has held those few things steady in you through four years of silence is His Spirit, not how many of them there are.

And nothing on this page is a case against the place you came from. It gave you the words in that box. It gave you your mother's order of service and a tea rota that quietly fed people for thirty years. Whatever those four years held, this is not the page where anybody's church goes on trial.