The Same Line in the Same Notebook

Aisling buys the same notebook. The narrow ones, hardback, plain. She is on her fifth.

She started keeping them in 2020 because a woman at church said writing prayers down was a good discipline, and it turned out to suit her. She is not a talker and she is not a person who prays out loud comfortably, and a notebook does not look at you.

Here is the thing about her notebooks.

On the first page of each one, at the top, she writes the same line. Not a verse. Her own words. It is one sentence about a specific situation in her family, and it has been the same sentence for five years, because she wrote it once and then, starting a new notebook eleven months later, found that she could not think of a better way to put it and wrote it again.

Five notebooks. Five identical first pages.

The rest of each notebook is normal. Ordinary days, other people's names, gratitude, the small things. It is only the first page.

She noticed what she had done in the fourth notebook. She was tidying and had all of them out and she opened them one after another and there it was, four times, in the same handwriting, and something went cold in her.

Because here is what it looked like from where she was standing: evidence. Four identical pages. Four years. Nothing changed. It looked like a case file. It looked like somebody had documented, in their own hand, that they had asked for the same thing four times and been refused four times, and she put the notebooks back in the drawer and did not open one for three weeks.

Here is the day it caught.

A friend, helping her move a bookcase, found the drawer and said, "Oh, are these journals? My mother kept those."

And Aisling said, "Sort of."

And her friend, flipping the top one open without asking, the way close friends do, landed on the first page and read it and said, "That's beautiful."

And Aisling said, "It's in all five."

And her friend said, "I know. I can see the drawer. That's why it's beautiful."

You have a repetition like that. Something you have written or said or thought so many times that the count of it has stopped being a record of your faithfulness and turned into a record of your not being answered.

There is a book, and it is not yours

Let me put down what I am not doing tonight, so you can stop bracing.

I am not going to tell you the situation in your family will resolve. I do not know. I am not going to tell you what the five years mean, because I do not know that either, and I would rather be quiet than reassuring and wrong.

What I will do is show you a strange little scene in Malachi, in the last book of the Old Testament, in a chapter where people are complaining that serving God appears to be getting them nowhere.

That is the setting, incidentally. That is not me stretching. Two verses earlier the people are saying, in effect, what is the point, the arrogant seem to do fine and we have kept His ordinances and walked mournfully and nothing has come of it.

And then this:

Then they that feared the LORD spake often one to another: and the LORD hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the LORD, and that thought upon his name.Malachi 3:16

A book of remembrance was written before him. There is a book. It is written in His presence. And what goes in it is not answered prayers or successful outcomes. What goes in it, according to the verse, is people who feared Him and spoke often to one another and thought upon His name, in a period when they had every appearance of getting nothing.

You have been entered in a record that counts the speaking rather than the outcome, and the record is kept in His presence and not in your drawer. Malachi 3:16 has the book written for people who were complaining that nothing was working, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into a cottage kitchen with five notebooks in a drawer.

And notice the verb before it: the LORD hearkened, and heard it. Hearkened is a leaning word. It is what someone does when they turn toward a conversation they were not part of. God is described as leaning in to overhear people who thought He was not paying attention.

You were overheard on every one of those first pages, and there is not one of them that failed to arrive. It is written that He hearkened and heard, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an ancient leaning-in a present fact.

What the count is actually counting

Now let me be careful here, because this could go badly if I got it wrong.

I am not going to tell you the repetition is a beautiful thing and leave it there, as though the wanting were the point and the situation did not matter. It matters. Something in Aisling's family is not right and has not been right for five years, and no verse about a heavenly book makes that fine, and I am not going to try.

What I want to do is take one thing off her, which is the reading of the notebooks as a case file.

Because there are two ways to read five identical pages. One is: I asked five times and was refused five times. The other is: for five years, through everything, this did not stop mattering to me and I did not stop bringing it. Both readings look at exactly the same drawer.

You are looking at a record of five years of not letting go, and the record He keeps of the same drawer reads it that way rather than the other way. Malachi 3:16 writes people into a book precisely during the stretch when they felt they were getting nowhere, and the Holy Spirit is the one who reads a life more accurately than the person living it.

And I want to name the specific thing that repetition does to a person, because naming it defuses most of it. Repetition without result starts, after a while, to feel like an accusation. Not against God, usually. Against yourself. Still? Still this? Are you not past this?

There is not a syllable of that anywhere in Scripture.

You have never once been asked to be past it, and there is no verse anywhere that puts an expiry on a request. Luke 18 opens with Jesus telling a parable specifically so that people would not give up, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps a long asking from being read as a failure.

And let me say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If those three weeks with the drawer shut went somewhere darker than discouragement, or if what sits under that first page has become more than you can hold, do not sit with it alone in a quiet house. Tell somebody tonight. Your friend, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me telling you a thing about your family. That is me refusing to leave you at that table by yourself.