write it down {something to fill your hands when you feel empty}

Today, this encouragement:

Write it down.

In her lap, a piece of notebook paper sits folded, pressed beneath her hands.  She picks it up, fingering the edges and the corner, where the paper turns up like a curling wave.

From across the room, I can see the faint blue ruling, the holes at the edges, the smooth, elegant strokes of her handwriting.  The way the paper looks, I can imagine the quick, half-blind way she pulled it from somewhere as she drove, maybe out of her purse or off the seat, or, if her car looks like mine, from right beside her where all the left things gather and collect and mock her efforts at cleanliness.  I can see her reaching with the one hand while the other steadies the wheel, her eyes glued to the road in front of her.  I can feel what she felt, the urgent need to write.

“I need to share something,” she says, looking into her lap and then back up, even though the paper is still in her hand, pressed beneath her thumb.

For weeks now, she has struggled.  Her husband has been out of work and hasn’t found many leads, and she has felt the weight of responsibility.  She knows her paycheck pays the bills, buys the food.  It’s been hard to trust that there will be enough.  All our prayers together, gathered with her own, simmer down and waft, just this sweet plea: Help, please.

So, in the carved out space we sisters keep, she shares a bit of God’s reply.  It’s hard to put into words, the way that spiritual conversation is less about words than impression, the way the Spirit presses right into a soul and moves a person, the way listening changes a heart.  Do not imagine the exaggerated, booming depth of a human voice.  Such a construct is far too limiting.  Imagine instead a whisper (1 Kings 19:12), really more like a necessary breath.  Imagine a gasping, first breath without which there is no real living (Ezekiel 37:9) and at the same time imagine a wind, a wind at once both gentle and so powerfully strong that a soul familiar with His Force will at once bend and spread and fly, recognizing the thrill of being carried along and pliable.   Jesus describes Him so, when He says, “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit (John 3:8).” Imagine these, and then imagine the unseen current that drives the mighty seas, the way that sheer strength moves you and you know with certainty that you have been carried, even though you can’t hear the current with your ears or see it with your eyes.

And so it happened, that as my friend drove home from work praying help, please, she found herself groping hastily with one hand for paper and a pen.  His reply came to her like a flood, an echo of something ancient, the modern mirror of Your clothes did not wear out and your feet did not swell during these forty years (Deuteronomy 8:4).  The Spirit pressed into her, testifying not simply you need and I am who and what and all you need, but an entire list, like an accounting of spiritual deposits.  He reshaped her heart, while she gasped and tried to drive, while she breathed and stared at the road and felt Him move.  Write it down, He pushed, moving her arm, her hand, because she needed to see the list with her eyes, because without the writing she could not have shared so specifically what He gave her.

She tells us about driving and writing and wondering if she could do both without wrecking the car.  The hand holding the paper moves frantically from side to side as she speaks it out loud, as she rewrites the list in her mind.  It’s a rare thing to be able to see right from the middle that where ever you’re going God has already been ahead of you preparing the way.  “I have no idea where this will lead,” she keeps saying, again and again as she reads the things God has done, sprinkling her faith right through the impression of His fingers, like glittering stones on a lit path.  She has a list now of just at the right time and miraculously enough and a way where there might have been none.  She has a list, on notebook paper she can hold in her fingers, of clothes that don’t wear out and feet that don’t swell and oil and flour enough for food through the famine (1 Kings 17:14).  Into the room she reads her list of blessings, her list of truth.  She can’t read the whole list without crying, and she says it matter-of-factly in the middle—“And I’m going to cry”—barely a pause before she continues with her voice breaking apart. The recording of gifts has carved in her a tender space.

“I have been having such a hard time with all this,” she confesses freely, “but I see now that it really hasn’t been so bad.  It really hasn’t been so bad.”  This last she says with a shred of awe, pausing just a beat before she finishes solidly.  “God has given us what we need.  He has taken care of us.  He is taking care of us.”

And the whole time she speaks, I listen, gripped, thinking about how well our Father knows us.  I think of the way God has always written down His love for us, the way He asks us to write it too, all over our walls, our doorframes, our hearts.  And in the next breath, He tells us to talk about what we’ve written, to share, to teach our children(Deuteronomy 6: 8,9; 11:19,20).  I hear my dear friend so compelled, see her scrawling blessings while she drives, hear her saying “I need to share something,”and it all reminds me of something Ann Voskamp wrote:

…I don’t even know they are gifts really until I write them down and that is really what they look like. …This does feel like my own reformation, all things wooden-hard giving way to the sky.  Recording gifts to reform.  I pick up a pen and write of the God-gifts…and the list is my thanks…I hold the seeing pen, the one with eyes, eyes that, in due time might just decode the whole of eucharisteo (One Thousand Gifts, 45 and 49).

This has been the Spirit’s grip on me too, the way He fills me, lifts me, pours me out.  I have learned that there’s truly something powerful about the writing down, the recording to reform and remember.  I need that intentional, habitual practice–that pen that sees–so much I nail the reforming words to the walls to remind me.  Sometimes Adam reads them before he prays:

The Spirit reshapes me by this testimony: you need and I am the who, the what, the how, the enough, and then God uses the command—write it down—as a foundation for joy, as a gathering, as a way to exhale what the Spirit breathes right into me.  When I have trouble trusting that there will be enough, I can still see the impression of Him clear-written in my own hand, my own intentional testimony of truth solidly printed across my doubts. This, then, must be why He urges,

Write it down.

And so, I spread my journal open on the bar for jotting.  We keep a jar that is, as we are, filled beautiful only by gifts of grace, and beside it a pen, because again and again the Spirit changes us like waves reshaping the shore, moving our arms, our hands, as we stare at the road ahead of us and try to breathe. And so we, like my dear friend, are compelled, urgently thus:

Write it down, and then speak it, loud.