Four Inventories, Four Answers

She did not plan to do this. She was looking for a certificate for something else entirely and the folder came out of the drawer and here we are.

Four sheets of paper on a kitchen table, spread out in a row like a hand of cards that will not go together.

The first one is from a church she was in for six years, and it is on paper that has gone slightly soft at the edges, and it says one thing.

The second is from a weekend away with a different church, four years later, and the format is nicer and it says something else. Not a related thing. A different thing.

The third is printed off a website and has her handwriting on the margin, which she does not remember writing and does not entirely agree with now.

And the fourth is from eighteen months ago, done properly, run by somebody trained, and it says a third thing. Or a fourth thing. She has stopped being able to tell whether two of them are the same idea in different vocabulary or two genuinely different claims about a person.

The dog is asleep against the chair leg. Her tea has gone cold twice. It is a quiet afternoon and the light is good.

And she is sitting there at fifty-two looking at four descriptions of a woman, all of them produced in good faith by serious people, none of them agreeing, and the feeling in the room is not frustration.

It is something closer to vertigo. Because if four honest attempts to see her produced four different answers, then either they are all wrong, or there is nothing steady enough in her to be seen the same way twice.

What this will not do

Let me put this down before anything else, because you have four pieces of paper in front of you already.

This is not going to be a fifth one. No adjudication, no synthesis, no way of reading all four together to find the real answer underneath. I am not going to describe you closely enough that you can take it as a diagnosis, and there is no list at the end for you to find yourself on.

And it is not going to say the four exercises were foolish. Serious people ran them, doing their best with what they had, and every one of them was trying to serve you.

You are not the unresolved question in the middle of four contradictory reports, and there is no fifth word that would finally settle what those four unsettled. That is not me letting you off the hook. Scripture is what says it, and the Holy Spirit has never once required a woman to be described consistently before He would deal with her.

There is a record and you are not keeping it

Here is the sentence I want on that table with the papers, and it is strange enough that people usually read it quickly.

Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.Psalm 139:16

Read it slowly, because it is doing something unusual.

There is a book. Not a description of you compiled after observation. A book written before, when as yet there was none of them, which is to say before there was anything about you to observe.

And the seeing came first: thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect. He saw the unfinished thing and the record was already complete.

You have a record that was written before you existed to be assessed, and it has never once been amended in the light of new evidence. I am not stretching that. Psalm 139:16 puts the writing before the fashioning in the same sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lets it come to rest in a woman at a kitchen table with cold tea.

Why they disagreed, which is not sinister

Now the practical thing, and it will take some of the vertigo out of the room.

Each of those four exercises measured what you reported about yourself at a particular moment in a particular life. The first one caught a woman of thirty in a church where certain things were needed and certain things were praised. The fourth caught a woman of fifty in an entirely different weather system.

Of course they differ. A photograph taken in four different rooms across twenty years will differ. That is not evidence that the person is unstable. It is evidence that photographs are of moments.

And there is a second thing, which is kinder still: you changed. Twenty years of living with God does that on purpose. A person who came out the same on all four sheets would have a different problem.

You have not been failing to hold still, and the difference between those four pages is mostly the honest record of a life that moved. The word says the members were written in continuance as they were fashioned, and the Spirit who has been at work in you across all four of those churches is not confused by the paperwork.

What could not be measured on any of them

And then the thing worth sitting with in the quiet.

Not one of those four exercises could see the parts of you that nobody has words for. The particular way you go quiet before you say something true. What you are like at a hospital bed. Whatever it is that made the dog choose your chair.

Those are not on the sheets, and they were never going to be, and they are most of what the people who love you would say if you asked them.

You are seen whole, including everything no instrument was built to detect, and that seeing was complete before the first of those four was printed. The word says His eyes saw the substance while it was still unformed, and the Spirit who searches all things has needed none of the four.

And this is not a reason to be sour about any of them. Put them in the folder. Keep them if you want. They are honest artifacts of four moments and they are not the record.