A Journal With Nobody Else In It

Nine notebooks. He counted them last winter and it bothered him for about a fortnight and then he stopped thinking about it.

Five years of them, more or less. He is disciplined about it in a way most people are not, and the entries are honest, and they are not sentimental. He writes what happened and what he thought about it and what he was afraid of, and he goes back and reads them, which almost nobody does.

They are a genuinely valuable record. If you handed them to somebody who wanted to understand what God has been doing in a person over five years, they would learn a great deal.

They would not learn a single thing about anybody else.

That is what he noticed last winter, going back through them looking for something, and it stopped him for a good few minutes. Nine notebooks, five years, and other people appear only as weather. As the conditions in which his own inner life was happening.

His wife is in there as a source of difficulty and a source of comfort. His colleagues appear when they affect him. There is a man he prayed with three times who gets one line, and the line is about how the praying made him feel.

Nobody in nine notebooks is there for their own sake.

And he is not a selfish man. That is the confusing part and it is why he put the thought down after a fortnight. He gives, he turns up, he is the one people call. If you asked anybody who knows him they would say he is generous.

The journal is not evidence of a selfish man. It is evidence of where the attention has been pointing.

So let me ask you.

If somebody read your record of the last five years, who else would be in it?

The whole sentence turns on two words

There is a verse near the start of Second Corinthians that gets quoted in cards and it is much stronger than the cards make it sound.

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.2 Corinthians 1:3 and 4

Now, most of the time we read the first two thirds of that and stop, because the first two thirds are lovely and they are about us.

The sentence does not stop there. It has a hinge in it and the hinge is two words.

So that.

Which is a purpose clause. It tells you what the comfort was for. Not primarily, not additionally, not as a nice secondary benefit. Paul is describing a flow with a direction: it comes to us and it goes on through us, and the going on is written into the reason it came.

And notice what that does to the mathematics of your notebooks.

It does not make the entries wrong. Everything in them happened. God did comfort you in all those troubles and you were right to write it down.

It makes them incomplete in a very specific way. You have recorded the arrival of something and never once recorded its departure, and Paul's sentence has both halves in it.

Hear where you stand, and hear it as somebody who is fond of you.

You are not a self-absorbed man with a stack of self-absorbed books. Scripture says God comforts us so that we can comfort others with the comfort we ourselves received, and the Holy Spirit never once filled somebody as a final destination.

And I want to name the gentle version of the family failing, because this is ours and not somebody else's.

We are people who take the interior seriously, and that is a strength, and I would not trade it. But a tradition that pays close attention to what God is doing inside a person will, if nothing corrects it, produce people whose entire spiritual record is interior.

Not because anybody taught it. Because that is what you get when the attention only ever points one way.

The word says the comfort comes so that it can go, and nine notebooks is a long time to have been receiving without writing down where any of it went.

And you are not a self-absorbed man with a stack of self-absorbed books. A man who writes down five honest years of what God has been doing has been paying attention to the right Person the whole way through, and 2 Corinthians 1 describes that comfort as something with a direction in it, and the Holy Spirit poured out on all people never once filled somebody as a final destination.