The Year Measured in Tasks

He keeps a list. He has kept one for nineteen years, in various forms, and the current form is a file with a date at the top of each week.

At the end of December he does a thing that started as a joke about eleven years ago and has stopped being a joke. He goes back through the whole year and counts.

This year it was one thousand four hundred and six.

He can tell you the shape of the year from that file better than from any other source. He could tell you which March it was, because of the run of forty one items in one week, and which August, because of the gap. It is, in a real sense, the most accurate record of his life that exists.

And on the twenty ninth of December, sitting with the file open, he tried to answer a different question, which is what the year had been like, and found he could not do it except by reading the list. He tried to think about the year without the file and got approximately nothing: a general impression of having been busy, and three or four moments, and then the file.

He is fifty. He is not unhappy. He would describe himself as content and would be broadly telling the truth. What he noticed on the twenty ninth of December was not misery, it was more like discovering that a measuring instrument has quietly become the thing being measured.

There is a second part, and it is the one that would make him uncomfortable to see written down. When something in the year went badly, he did not really examine it, because there was always a next item, and the next item is a reliable way of not being in a room with a thing. Nineteen years is a long time to have had that available.

You will have your own twenty ninth of December. The moment you go looking for your own year and find a list where it should be.

What Jesus says to seventy two people who have just succeeded

There is a scene in Luke that I find one of the strangest and most useful in the Gospels, because Jesus does something you would not expect a leader to do.

He has sent out seventy two people. They come back, and they are exhilarated, and they report, and their report is genuinely impressive. Even the demons are subject to us in your name. He agrees with them. He says He saw Satan fall like lightning. He is not deflating them.

And then He says this.

Nevertheless, do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.Luke 10:20

Nevertheless. He interrupts a success report, at the peak of it, with a correction that is not about the accuracy of the report. Everything they said was true. He redirects where they are putting their weight.

And notice the two things He puts side by side. On one side, an achievement, verified, extraordinary. On the other side, a name written somewhere, which involves no activity by them at all and about which they can report nothing.

So take it plainly: you are written down somewhere you did nothing to reach, and that is what Luke 10 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an interruption of a mission report and lays it down on the twenty ninth of December beside an open file.

Which is the answer to the instrument problem. He went looking for his year and found a list, and concluded that the list had eaten the year. But Jesus is describing a second record entirely, which does not consist of items, cannot be counted, was not compiled by the person it concerns, and is the one He tells them to rejoice in.

Fourteen hundred and six is one record. It is a real record and it is not a lie. It is simply not the one that has his name in it in that sense.

You have a name written in a place where nothing you finished appears, because the written word puts the rejoicing there rather than in the report, and His Spirit is the one who makes that land on a man who has been reading his own year off a file.

What the fourteen hundred are not

Now the guardrail, and this article needs both halves of it.

The fourteen hundred and six are not a total that counts for anything with God. There is no account. Nothing about a heavy March raises His regard and nothing about the August gap lowered it. A crown in Scripture is placed on a head by somebody else, always, and in the one glimpse we get of people holding one, they take it off and throw it down.

And equally, the fourteen hundred and six are not a waste and not an idol to be repented of. Jesus does not tell the seventy two that their mission was a mistake. He says nevertheless, which is a word that leaves the first thing standing. Work is not the problem. Weight is. You have a year of real work that was never where your weight was supposed to rest, and Scripture is what holds both halves, and His Spirit is what stops the second half from erasing the first.

You are held by a regard that did not move across fourteen hundred items, because the written word puts our standing on Christ rather than on our record, and His Spirit is what makes that a floor rather than a phrase.