The Prayers I Wrote in a Blue Notebook

It is under the tax things and the spare charger, and you know exactly where it is without opening the drawer.

Blue. Hardback. You bought it specifically, which is the part that still embarrasses you, because buying a special notebook to write prayers in is a thing you did at a particular point in your life with a particular seriousness that you can no longer entirely enter.

Eight years ago. Four months of writing, most mornings, sometimes twice a day. Prayers for people, some of them by name. Prayers about the church you were part of then. Sentences you can still quote and have never said to anybody.

You believed at the time that God had asked you to write them down. Not in a voice. In the quiet way that a thing gets settled in a person, and you did not question it, and you filled about two thirds of it before the writing stopped.

The writing stopped when the church did.

You have not opened it in a long while. You know that if you did, the first thing you would meet is your own handwriting from before, and the second thing would be a question you have been walking around for eight years, which is what all of that was for.

God asks for things to be written and does not always say when

There is an instruction in Isaiah that has a very long horizon on it.

Now go, write it before them in a table, and note it in a book, that it may be for the time to come for ever and ever.Isaiah 30:8

The context is not a happy one. Isaiah is speaking to people who do not want to hear it, and the writing is commanded precisely because the moment is not the moment.

That it may be for the time to come. God attaches the purpose to a future He does not date, and He does not tell the writer whether he will be there for it.

That is what an instruction to write actually is. It is a thing put down now for a use that is not now, and the person holding the pen is not given the schedule.

You were asked to write, and you wrote, and the instruction is complete. I am not putting my own idea over you here. Scripture says note it in a book that it may be for the time to come, Isaiah 30:8, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets that settle over a woman standing in front of a drawer she has not opened.

The obedience was not conditional on a reader

Here is where eight years quietly rewrites a memory.

You did not write it to be read. That was not the arrangement, and there was no arrangement, and nobody ever said the notebook would be used.

But the mind will not tolerate an unfinished shape, and so over eight years it has supplied an ending, and the ending it supplied is that the notebook was meant to become something and did not, which means the whole thing was a mistake.

That is not a memory. It is a reconstruction.

You have already done the whole of what was asked. Scripture does not measure an obedience by its reception, Jeremiah 25:3, and the Holy Spirit did not withdraw an instruction because a church closed and a season ended.

The embarrassment about the notebook itself

And there is the other thing, and it is smaller and sharper.

You are embarrassed that you bought a special notebook. That you were that person, in that season, with that much seriousness.

I would ask you to be careful there, because Scripture nowhere treats an open season as a phase to grow out of, Psalm 147:11, and the Holy Spirit has not reclassified her. That embarrassment is doing something. It is not humility. It is a slow retreat from a woman who was more open than you currently are, and it is being conducted in the name of realism.

She was not naive. She heard something and she did a plain, concrete, obedient thing about it, and that is not a lesser way to be than the one you are in now.

You have not been shown to be foolish by eight years. Scripture says the Lord taketh pleasure in them that hope in His mercy, Psalm 147:11, and the Holy Spirit does not look back on a woman's most open season and file it as a phase.

And I am not going to tell you what it is for

I do not know. That has to be said plainly on a page like this one.

I do not know whether anybody ever reads that notebook. I do not know whether it was for the people named in it, or for a moment in your own life that has not come, or whether the writing itself was the point and the pages were the by-product.

Anybody who tells you confidently is guessing.

What is settled is smaller and firmer than a purpose. You are not holding a mistake in that drawer. Scripture says His word does not return unto Him void, Isaiah 55:11, and the Holy Spirit does not lose what He asked somebody to write down.