Four Vague Words In A Note On My Phone

You are more organized about this than most people alive.

There is a note. It has a title. You made it in a hopeful moment two or three years ago and you have added to it, on and off, ever since.

And every December you open it, and there it is.

Four words. Maybe six. Something like: likes cooking. Something like: mentioned a trip. Something like: the blue one.

And you sit there staring at your own handwriting from March and you cannot remember one single thing about what you meant.

So the note goes back in the drawer of the phone and you go and do what you were always going to do, and somewhere in there you decide that you are the sort of person who cannot even keep a note properly.

That is the part I want to argue with, because the note is not the failure. The note is nearly right.

Mary kept all these things

There is a sentence about a woman keeping things that has been sitting in the middle of a Christmas story for two thousand years.

But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. (Luke 2:19, King James Version)

Kept, and pondered. Two separate activities, and the first one is the one nobody notices.

She kept them. That is a holding on to, deliberate, at the time, in the middle of the event rather than afterward. Shepherds came in and said a great deal and everybody around her marveled and went home, and she did something none of them did. She kept it.

You have the same instinct that woman had, and Luke 2:19 puts the keeping down as a thing a person does on purpose rather than as a memory that happens to survive. The Holy Spirit is the one who made a habit of keeping worth writing into the account at all, and He wrote it in without one word of explanation.

Now the second verb, which is where the trouble hides.

Pondered them. Not pondered a summary of them. Not pondered the general area they belonged to. She turned the actual things over.

And you cannot turn over four words. There is nothing there to turn.

You are not short of the will to keep things, and it is written that she kept all these things rather than a note about them. The Spirit of God is the one who separates a keeping from a filing, and the difference between those two is the whole of what has gone wrong here.

Here is the plain version of it.

The note in your phone is a filing system. It has categories in it. Likes cooking is a category. Mentioned a trip is a category. And a category in December is a locked door, because the thing that made it worth writing down was never the category.

You have been storing the label instead of the thing, and His word is careful to say she kept the things themselves. The Holy Spirit is the one who has kept the actual moment alive in you for years even while the note went cold, which is why you can feel that something was there.

Keep the sentence, not the subject

So here is the change, and it costs nothing and takes eleven seconds.

Write what they said. Their words. The actual sentence, or as near to it as you can get, and the month.

Not: likes cooking.

But: said in June that she has always wanted to be able to make her grandmother's bread and does not know where to start.

Read those two again, side by side. The first one is a shelf you cannot reach. The second one is somebody's whole heart, sitting there in the open, and anybody could build something out of it.

You are eleven seconds away from a note that works, and Luke 2:19 shows a woman keeping the words themselves and turning them over later. The Spirit of God is the one who makes an ordinary sentence in June still warm in December, and He does that through the writing rather than around it.

And there is a second half to it. Put the month.

The month tells you whether it was a passing thing or a returning one. If the same subject shows up in March and again in September, that is not a preference, that is a longing, and a longing is the most useful thing a person can ever hand you without meaning to.

You are collecting evidence rather than ideas, and it is written that she pondered them, which is what a person does with things they actually still have. The Holy Spirit is the one who lines two dates up in a man's mind and makes him see what neither one showed on its own.

The note was never for December

One more thing, and it is the part that will change how the whole year feels.

The reason the note fails is that it has been written for a future emergency. It gets opened once, under pressure, in the one month when the mind is least able to reconstruct anything.

That is the wrong job for it. Nothing kept that way survives.

Mary did not keep those things in order to solve a problem eleven months later. She kept them because they were worth keeping, and the keeping was its own act, done at the time, with the shepherds still standing in the room.

You have been asking a note to do a job it was never built for, and Luke 2:19 puts the keeping in the middle of the moment rather than at the far end of it. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a man notice something while it is still happening, and that noticing has been going on in you all along.

So write it when it happens. In the car, at the counter, standing in a hallway with the phone already in your hand.

And then leave it alone. Do not go back and tidy it, do not turn it into a plan, and do not judge it. The keeping is finished the second the words are down.

You are done the moment the sentence is written, and it is written that she kept them first and pondered them afterward. The Holy Spirit is the one who does the pondering part with a man later, and He does not need help with the timing of it.

And when December comes, the note will not be four words. It will be nine or ten sentences in other people's own voices, and the only difficulty left is choosing.

You have a good year of listening already behind you, and the written word calls the keeping of things a woman's own deliberate act rather than a lucky memory. The Spirit of God is the one who has been putting these sentences in front of you all year long, and He has not been doing it for nothing.