The Tally in My Head

There is no app and there is no notebook and there is nothing anybody could ever find.

It runs anyway. It has run since she was about twenty, and it is completely automatic now, and it does not require her to think about it any more than breathing does.

Good day. Good day. Bad day. Good. Bad. Bad.

A good day is not complicated: she was up when she meant to be, she read something, she did not say the thing she wanted to say to the person on the phone, she was warm to her roommate even though. A bad day is the reverse of that, or it is one specific thing going wrong, or occasionally it is nothing at all identifiable and she still marks it.

And on a losing week she cannot sleep. Not in an interesting way. She lies there at one in the morning and the week is running, and she is not praying about it exactly, and she is not exactly worrying either, and she has never once described this to anybody, including the counselor she saw for four months, because it always seemed like the least urgent thing she had to say.

She is twenty-seven.

And she is not in doubt about being forgiven. She took the whole of it to God at nineteen, properly, in a way she still remembers, and it was real and it has never come loose. She would tell you plainly, and she would be right.

And the scoreboard has never once stopped running.

Because underneath it, unstated and never examined, there is something being kept in credit. Not with anybody in particular. Just kept, the way you keep a plate spinning, on the flat assumption that a person is only as safe as the last few days.

Maybe you have a tally. It may not be days. It may be a run of Sundays, or a streak, or a number you would be embarrassed to say out loud. And you are not in doubt about being forgiven, and the whole shape of your week is a person keeping to terms.

Sit down on the counter stool. Somebody else ordered dinner, which is deliberate.

Probation is a legal condition and it ended

Let me put it as the legal thing it is, because it is not a feeling and it will not be handled as one.

Probation means the sentence stands, suspended, and conduct is being observed, and the observing is what holds the suspension in place. A person on probation is not free. She is out on terms, and she knows exactly what the terms are even when nobody has ever written them down.

That is exactly what the tally is. Conduct, observed, continuously, by the only observer available, and a week is a reporting period.

And the terms ended. Not are ending. Ended, at nineteen, at a point, and nobody has been observing your conduct since.

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.Ephesians 2:8-9

Read what that verse rules out and read how thoroughly it does it. Not your own doing. Not a result of works. The gift of God. Three separate ways of saying the same thing in one sentence, which is what Scripture does when it expects to be argued with, and the Holy Spirit is the one who saw to it that the argument got written down three times over.

You were saved by something that was never on a weekly footing, and Ephesians 2 says it three different ways in one sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a verse a person can quote land as a verse that applies to her.

You were released outright and not on report, and Romans 8 says you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear but the Spirit of adoption as sons, and the Holy Spirit is the one that verse names as the difference between the two arrangements. A report has periods. An adoption does not.

Your effort was never contemptible

Now something said carefully, because a paragraph like that could be turned into a way of making eight years look ridiculous, and it is not ridiculous.

She did get up when she meant to, most days. She did not say the thing on the phone, and that mattered to somebody who does not know it mattered. She was warm to her roommate even though, and even though is a real achievement and nobody hands out a medal for it.

The effort was good. Most of it will stay, and it should.

What is coming out is not the trying. It is the ledger it has been posted to.

You were never keeping anything in credit with a good Tuesday, and Titus 3 says He saved us not because of works done by us in righteousness but according to His own mercy, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can take a ledger out from under a good week and leave the week standing. Nobody was reading the scoreboard. There has never been anybody at the other end of it.

This is not a new practice

And one more, before the turn, because the plan is already forming.

There is no new discipline here. Nobody is asking you to notice the tally every day and correct it, or to keep a gratitude list to balance it out, or to run a rhythm of grace that you will then be extremely consistent about. You would be very good at that within a month, and it would be the same scoreboard with the categories renamed.

One thing, once. That is all any of this is.

You have a standing that does not have a reporting period, and it is written that it is the gift of God and not a result of works so that no one may boast, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a gift stay a gift when a person has spent eight years trying to earn it retroactively.