The Asterisk in My Own Handwriting

Wednesday, and she is halfway down the second page of the handout.

She reads it out loud the way she reads everything, unhurried, with her finger under the line so nobody loses the place. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Thirty people in that room and she means it for every single one of them.

And in the half beat between all and unrighteousness, in her own head, in her own handwriting, an asterisk goes in beside her own name.

It has been going in for nine years. It is not a doubt about the verse. She would defend that verse against anybody. It is an exception. A small footnote that says: everybody in this room, and one particular thing in me, which is a different case for reasons that are obvious to her and that she has never once written down or said out loud.

She is fifty-two. She has taught in that church for nineteen years and trained most of the people who now teach in it. Her class is the one people come back to. She is not a fraud and she knows she is not a fraud, which is part of what makes it so lonely: there is nothing here for anybody to catch.

She has never mentioned it. Not to her husband. Not to the two women she has taught alongside for a decade. Not to the pastor. Because how do you raise it. Everything about her life is a testimony to that verse working, and to say that she has quietly exempted herself from it would sound like she was fishing to be told otherwise, and she would rather be alone with it than be reassured about it.

Maybe you have an asterisk. It might not be a verse in a handout. It might be a promise you would defend to the death for anybody else on earth and have never once let land on yourself. And after enough years you stopped noticing that you were making an exception and started experiencing it as the truth.

Sit down here where the chairs are. Nothing coming is going to tell you the asterisk is nothing.

The exception is a feeling wearing a doctrine's clothes

Let me put the distinction where a teacher can see it, because everything here rests on it.

There is what the text says and there is what rises in you when you apply it to yourself. Two registers. They can disagree for nine years without either one moving the other. The promise was written in a court and delivered in a letter. The asterisk goes in somewhere behind your eyes in about a quarter of a second. A quarter of a second is not long enough for anything to be adjudicated.

But with You there is forgiveness, that You may be feared.Psalm 130:4

That is one of the strangest and best sentences in the psalms and you already know why. Not so that You may be taken for granted. So that You may be feared, which is to say: taken with utter seriousness. The forgiveness is what produces the awe. It is not a loophole in God's character, it is the most solid thing in it.

You are dealing with a God whose forgiveness is the very thing His awe rests on, and Psalm 130 is where that is written, and it is the Holy Spirit and not a footnote of your own composition who tells you how it applies.

And notice what the verse you read out loud on Wednesday actually says. All unrighteousness. Not most. Not all except the one you are thinking of. You have been reading a word that has no exceptions in it and inserting one, and what is written says all, and His Spirit is the one who has kept you reading it out loud for nine years until somebody pointed at the word.

Why the exception feels like discernment

Now the mechanism, because a woman who teaches will do better with an explanation than with a hand on the arm.

The asterisk does not feel like doubt. That is the whole reason it has survived nine years. It feels like accuracy. It feels like the one place where a teacher is being honest rather than sentimental, and every other time the promise gets applied generously it feels like generosity, which quietly confirms that the exception is the rigorous bit.

But look at where it is applied. Never to another person. Not once in nineteen years have you looked at somebody in row three and thought: that verse, but not for you. The rule you use for everybody else is the rule, and the rule you use for yourself is a footnote you wrote in a hard season and have never audited.

You are not the one case Scripture was not written for, and Romans 10 says the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing His riches on all who call on Him, and it is His Spirit who applies a promise and not your private editorial policy.

I am not going to promise the asterisk goes

The honest part, and I will not do to you what somebody with good intentions probably did once.

I do not know that the exception will stop rising. Nobody does. For some people it thins within a season once it has been named out loud. For others it comes back for years, quieter each time, and gets easier to overrule. There is no timetable in Scripture and I am not inventing one to give this a tidier ending than the truth.

What I will tell you is that the asterisk was never what made the promise real, so it has never once been able to unmake it. You were cleared by a finished work and not by a settled opinion of yourself, and Hebrews 10 says by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified, and the Spirit is what holds that up on a Wednesday when a footnote goes in behind your eyes.

And here is what you are allowed to do, and I doubt anybody has offered it to a woman who teaches. You are allowed to read the verse out loud over yourself with the asterisk still in place. Not once it lifts. With it there. That is not pretending, because pretending would be telling those two women you have no trouble with this. Saying the true thing with the exception still rising is the opposite of pretending: it is telling the truth about the promise and the truth about the quarter second in the same breath.