The Gray Run in March

He built it in January, and he built it because he wanted God, which is a thing worth saying first and saying plainly.

Three columns. Pray before the kettle. Ten minutes in the book. Phone stays in the hall until both are done. One row per day, one tick per column, and a rule he set up himself so the cell turns green when the box is ticked and stays gray when it is not.

For a while it was one of the best things in his life. He is not a man who talks much about his inner world, and here was a small honest instrument that let him see it. Ninety-one green in a row by the end of March. He never showed anybody. He looked at it more than anybody would guess.

Then a fortnight happened. Nothing dramatic. A run of bad nights, a job that ran late four evenings out of five, his mother needing lifts to appointments, and the alarm going off in a dark room and being silenced by a hand that had already decided.

The sheet did what he had asked it to do. It went gray.

And the gray did something he had not designed and never intended. He opened the file one Saturday and saw a fortnight of empty cells sitting under ninety-one full ones, and something in him read it as a message. Not a record. A message. As though the file were showing him, in a language he had built himself, that God had taken a step back from him in the second week of March and had not stepped in again since.

After that it got quieter and worse. He noticed he had begun opening the sheet before he prayed. Checking his standing. Working out what sort of welcome he was entitled to today, before he opened his mouth.

That is where this story stops being about a spreadsheet, and you know it already, because you have your own version of the file. Yours might be a habit tracker, a wall calendar, a notebook with dates in the margin, or nothing on paper at all and simply a running total you keep in your head. And you have been consulting it, quietly, before you speak to God, to find out how He is likely to receive you this morning.

What the gray actually recorded

Let me name the wound properly before I lift anything, because a lift laid over an unnamed wound just slides off.

The tracker was not the sin. Nobody is going to stand here and tell a man who wanted God badly enough to build himself an instrument that the instrument was the problem. That would be cruel and it would be false. Wanting to see your own life clearly is a good desire, and a record of what you actually did is a useful thing to have.

What went wrong is one small misreading, and it happened so quietly that you could not have caught it at the time. The sheet is an accurate record of what you did. You began reading it as a record of what God is doing. Those are two different documents, and only one of them was ever in your hands.

You have been reading the wrong file for His face. Scripture says that if we believe not, yet He abideth faithful, He cannot deny Himself, and notice that the verse does not say He is patient with faithlessness, it says His faithfulness is a property of His own nature and not a response to ours, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence with that much weight in it and sets it down inside a man at a kitchen table on a Saturday morning.

Know therefore that the LORD thy God, he is God, the faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him, to a thousand generations.Deuteronomy 7:9

Read the verb, and read whose verb it is. Keepeth covenant. Present tense, His action, and set down there as one of the things that make Him God rather than one of the things He manages when conditions are favourable. Then look at who He keeps it with: them that love Him. That is not the same as them that manage it, and the difference is the whole of your March. Loving God is what was happening in January when the sheet got built, and it is what was happening at half past five in a dark room when the alarm went and the body would not, and a thousand generations is the timescale the verse reaches for. A fortnight does not register on a scale like that.

You were never the collateral on this agreement. The written word says the new covenant is in His blood, poured out, past tense, finished, and a covenant sealed in somebody else's blood is not renegotiated by somebody else's alarm clock, and the Spirit who was given as a seal on you did not check the sheet before He came in.

Which party is keeping this

Here is the question the whole thing turns on, and it is only five words long. Which of us is keeping this?

That question has been getting an answer out of you every time the file gets opened first. If the covenant holds when the cells are green and wobbles when they go gray, then the load has quietly moved onto one man's shoulders, and it is a heavier arrangement than God ever offered anybody.

Look at how covenant is actually made in Scripture. Two parties would pass together between the pieces, and each was saying with their feet: let this be done to me if I fail my side. And when God cut covenant with Abram, Abram was asleep. The fire and the lamp went through alone. God took both halves of the obligation, His and the man's, while the man lay in the dark doing precisely nothing, which is the point and always was.

You are inside a covenant that has one signature holding it and the signature is not yours. Scripture says He has said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee, and the promise is made in His own voice about His own conduct rather than about yours, and the Holy Spirit is called the earnest of the inheritance for exactly this reason: a deposit is not withdrawn because the recipient had a bad fortnight.

And the mercies are described as new every morning. Not renewed on request. Not restored once a run is rebuilt. New, every morning, including the eleven mornings in March you have been counting against yourself, which were being supplied with fresh mercy the whole time you were sleeping through them.

You have not been on probation since the second week of March. His word says nothing in all creation is able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord, and the list Paul reaches for is death, life, angels, principalities, height and depth, which is a list chosen precisely because it contains everything, and the Spirit who bears witness with your spirit has not gone quiet, whatever the file says.