The Letter You Read Four Times

The cards come down on the sixth of January because that is how it has always been done, and there is a particular sadness to the room afterwards that nobody in the house has ever mentioned out loud.

There is a string across the alcove with little wooden pegs on it. There is a shoebox for the ones that get kept and a bag for the rest. It takes about ten minutes.

The letter is not on the string. The letter has been on the mantelpiece since the eighteenth of December, propped against the clock, two sides of A4, printed in a font somebody in that family chose years ago and has stuck with.

It is a nice letter. That is the thing worth saying first. There is no boasting in it and there is nothing unkind anywhere in it. It is a woman writing to people she genuinely loves about a year that went well: the extension finally finished after the business with the builders, the middle one's term abroad, a half marathon in the wet, a photograph of all five of them on a beach in April.

She reads it standing up, in the alcove, with the pegs in her other hand.

That is the fourth time.

The first was on the day it arrived. The second was in the kitchen the same evening, properly, sitting down. The third was somewhere around the twenty-ninth when the house was quiet and the days had lost their names.

And this is where you come in, because you know exactly what the fourth reading is for.

The fourth reading is not for the news. You have the news. The fourth reading is you running the comparison one more time, slowly, holding your own year up against theirs paragraph by paragraph, and you have got very efficient at it: their extension against your boiler, their April beach against your fortnight at your sister's, their promotion against the thing you did not apply for.

The arithmetic always comes out the same way. It comes out as one word, and the word is behind.

You get the last cards off the string and you sort them into the box and the bag, and somewhere near the bottom of the pile there is a small one. Robin on the front, the cheap kind, from the woman who lived next door before she moved out to be nearer her son.

Three lines inside, in biro, and no news in it at all. She hopes the winter is being kind. She still thinks about the summer you helped her get the fence back up. Same as ever, she says, and then her name.

You stand there in the alcove with a robin in one hand and two sides of A4 in the other, and you notice, without wanting to, which one you are going to keep.

Nobody entered you into this

Let me say plainly what this message is not, because in a category like this a stranger's kindness deserves to be treated with suspicion.

Nothing here wants anything from your money. Nothing here connects what is in your account to what God does, in either direction. That connection is where people get hurt, and it is not made here, not once and not softly.

What I want to take off you is the ruler.

You are not behind, because behind requires a shared clock and no such clock exists. Scripture says of those who measure themselves by themselves, and compare themselves among themselves, that they are not wise, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can lift that off a person who has been doing it in an alcove with pegs in her hand.

But they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise.2 Corinthians 10:12

Read the reason it gives. Not unkind, not ungrateful, not sinful. Not wise. It is the language you would use about a tool being used for a job it was never made for, which is what comparison is: an instrument that produces a number every time you pick it up, and the number is always about you, and it is always the same.

You have never once been weighed against that family, and it is written into the way God actually assesses a life. Galatians 6:4 says let every man prove his own work, and then shall he have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another, and the Spirit of God who inspired that line put the joy specifically in the not-comparing, which tells you where He thinks the joy has been going.

The lines were cast by somebody else

There is a Hebrew image I want to put in your hands, because it takes the whole thing apart, and it does it with a measuring instrument.

When land was apportioned in Israel it was done with a cord, a surveyor's line, stretched out across the ground to mark what belonged to whom. And the psalm says: The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage.

Fallen. Not achieved, not won, not caught up on. The one holding the cord is God, and the portion is a thing that falls to a person rather than a thing they overtake somebody to reach.

You were handed a life with the lines already cast in it, and they were not cast against anybody else's. Psalm 16:6 is not a poem about being satisfied with less, it is a statement about who did the surveying, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land in a person on the sixth of January rather than staying a nice sentence.

Which is why the fourth reading was never really about that family. They were not competing with you. They wrote you a warm letter about a good year and put a stamp on it.

And you are not loved differently in a lean year than in a full one. Paul wrote that he knew how to be abased and how to abound, everywhere and in all things instructed, and Scripture never once turns a person's circumstances into a readout on how they stand with God, and the Holy Spirit is not distributing His nearness according to whose year it was.

I want to say that one more time in plain words, because it is the lie that does the most damage in this area. Money is not a scoreboard of anybody's faith. Not yours, not theirs, not anyone's, in either direction. A hard year is not a verdict, and a good year is not a medal.