Eleven Years of Notebooks

There are about forty of them. You have not counted properly because counting would be a way of deciding something.

Sermon notes. Things people said. A page from a conference in 2016 with three points on it and nothing else. Two of them are almost entirely blank because you started them and did not keep them up.

You have not opened one in years.

Not out of neglect. It has genuinely never occurred to you to go and look something up in them, because you do not know what is in which, and the material was all better in the moment than it would be now, and the truth is that the notes were mostly a way of paying attention rather than a way of recording anything.

And you cannot throw them away.

That is the thing worth saying out loud. You have picked one up twice and put it back down, and there is a feeling attached to the idea of a bin bag that is out of all proportion to forty notebooks nobody reads.

They are in a box in the room you use for other things, and the box has been moved four times and never opened, and it takes up a corner and a small amount of every week.

That is what this page is about, and there is nothing after it.

What this page will not do

This is the last category on this site and it has one rule, so let me be exact about it.

Nothing is going to be added. There will be no system for reviewing notes, no better method, no suggestion that you digitize them, and no habit to adopt.

I am not going to tell you that taking notes was a waste. It was not; it was how you listened, and the listening happened, and the listening is not in the box. It is in you and it has been for eleven years.

And I am not going to tell you that you must throw them out. That is a decision and it is yours and I have not seen them.

What I am going to do is put down one thing and add nothing.

You are not being asked to carry an archive. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and nearness has never been stored anywhere, and the Holy Spirit is in that room with a man and a box that has been moved four times.

The verse is about the weight of the thing given

There is a half-sentence at the end of Matthew 11 that is easy to read past because the first half is more famous.

For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.Matthew 11:30

Two claims and both of them are about weight.

Easy there is a word about fit rather than about effort. A yoke that is easy is one that has been made for the animal wearing it and does not rub, and anybody who has carried something badly balanced knows the difference that makes.

And then light, which is plain.

What He offers is described entirely in terms of load. Not in terms of content, not in terms of how much there is to know, and not in terms of what has been retained.

Now look at what you have accumulated in eleven years of good listening. Forty notebooks in a box in a corner, moved four times. None of that is mine to declare on my own. Scripture said it first in Matthew 11:30, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings it the distance.

That is not the burden He described.

You are not carrying what He gave you. Scripture says for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light, Matthew 11:30, and both words in it are about weight rather than about content, and the Holy Spirit has never once been stored in a box that has not been opened.

What the box is actually holding

Not the material. You have said yourself that the material was better in the moment. Scripture put that in writing long before you read it here, in Matthew 11:30, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes written words land.

It is holding a version of you. A man who will one day have the time, who will go through them properly, who will find the thing from 2016 and use it for something.

That man is not coming. Not because you are lazy; because he does not exist, and he never did, and he was invented at about the third notebook as a reason not to have to decide anything. I have no authority to say that by myself. Scripture carries it in Matthew 11:30, and the Holy Spirit carries it to you.

And keeping a box for somebody who does not exist has a cost that is small and continuous. It is not the corner of the room. It is that every time you see it, a very quiet obligation registers, and you have registered it perhaps four thousand times in eleven years.

You are not obliged to provide for a self who is not coming. Scripture says sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, Matthew 6:34, and the boundary drawn is around one day rather than around a future in which everything is caught up, and the Holy Spirit has never once asked anybody to keep an appointment with a version of themselves that does not exist.

What is already yours

This is the whole of the good news on this page and there is nothing after it.

Everything that mattered from those eleven years is not in the box. It went in at the time. It is in how you think about two or three things, in a sentence you say to your children, in the way you handle something at work that you used to handle differently.

You could not tell me which notebook any of that came from and that is exactly the point. The transfer happened. It happened at the time, in the listening, and the paper was the by-product rather than the deposit.

Nothing is lost by the box going. There is nothing in it that is not either already in you or already gone, and neither of those is affected by a bin bag.

You are not going to lose eleven years. Scripture says the word of God is quick, and powerful, Hebrews 4:12, and it is described as acting on the person rather than as being preserved by them, and the Holy Spirit did the depositing at the time rather than storing it for later.