Nothing That Is Mine

Verlie had eleven things on that list and not one of them was hers.

It started in April as a sensible list on the back of a feed receipt and by the second week of June it was three pages in a spiral book, and she had it with her everywhere, including church, which she is not proud of.

The marquee company. The road, which the county had opened up in the second week and had not said one word about closing. Her nephew's flight. The other nephew, who is the reason they needed the second cake. The forecast, which she had been checking four times a day since the eleventh and which had changed its mind three times about the Saturday.

The chairs. There is a whole page on the chairs.

Her granddaughter, it should be said, was perfectly relaxed about all of it, which Verlie found in some moods a comfort and in others almost more than she could bear.

And here is the thing about that list, which Verlie could have told you at any point and never once sat down long enough to say out loud.

She could not move a single item on it.

Not one. Every job that was actually hers, she had done in April. The rest of it was weather and other people, and she had been carrying it for nine weeks anyway, in a spiral book, in her handbag, at church.

Her sister Dell found her on the back steps at six in the morning on the Saturday with a cup of tea and nothing in her hands.

Dell said, "What is left?"

And Verlie thought about it properly, for the first time since April.

And she said, "Nothing that is mine."

Dell sat down on the step below her, which at seventy-nine takes some doing, and the two of them sat there while it got light.

And Dell said, after a while, "You know that is the first time you have sat down since Easter."

Now. Whatever your Saturday is.

There is a list. It might be in a spiral book or it might be the one that runs in your head from about four in the morning. And you have been carrying it as a whole, all of it, every day, without ever once sorting it into the part that is yours and the part that is not.

The throne was established before the list

David writes a sentence at the end of the psalm everybody knows the beginning of, and it is the plainest statement of God's government in the Psalms.

The Lord has established His throne in the heavens, and His sovereignty rules over all.Psalm 103:19

Has established. Past tense, finished, done a long time ago. The throne is not being set up in response to your Saturday. It was in place before there was a list, before there was a county road crew, before there was a forecast.

Rules over all. And that word means all of it: the weather, the marquee company, the nephew's flight, the chairs. Not a special providence for the important things and an open field for the rest. All.

So hear this said over you, on the back steps at six in the morning. You are living under a throne that was established before your list was written, and the nine weeks you have spent carrying items that were never yours have not moved one of them a single inch. That is written down, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a fact about a throne and lets a woman sit down on a step with it, which is a different work from agreeing that the fact is true.

Now let me be careful here, because this is where this doctrine gets misused and I will not do that to you.

Nothing in this message says God arranged the road works to teach you anything, and nothing here says the Saturday is going to go well. I do not know how it will go and neither does anybody who tells you otherwise.

And nothing here says stop working. Verlie did every job that was hers, properly, in April, and she was right to, and if she had not there would have been no wedding at all. Scripture is full of people who did everything within reach. There is no verse anywhere that asks a person to go slack because God is on the throne, and a woman who reads this and lets things slide has read it wrong.

What is here is the sorting.

That is the whole of it, and it is smaller than you expect and it changes an entire summer. There are two kinds of item on every list, and they look identical when they are written in the same handwriting on the same page.

There are the ones you can move. Do those. Do them well and do them early, the way she did.

And there are the ones you cannot. Those are not lighter. They are frequently the heavier ones, which is exactly why they get carried, and you have been carrying yours in a handbag since April.

The word says to cast your burden on the Lord and He will sustain you, and casting is not a gentle verb, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a person actually able to hand over the second kind, which nobody manages by deciding to.

And let me say the thing Dell said without saying it.

You have not sat down since Easter.

That is the real cost, and it is not the list. The list would have turned out however it turned out. What the carrying has taken is every ordinary evening between April and now, and those do not come back, and nobody was ever asking you to spend them.

There was a movement five hundred years ago made up of people who could not move a single item on their own list. They had no say in the law, no say in the throne, and no protection worth the name. What they held on to was not that things would go their way, because for a great many of them things did not. It was that there was a throne established over all of it, and their own inability to move anything was not the last word on anything.

That doctrine did not come from people in charge. It came from people with nothing in their hands.