I Keep A Ledger In My Head

You could produce it from memory right now.

Not in numbers. It is not that kind of account. But you could go through four or five people and tell me, with dates, what you have given and what has come back, and the shape of it would be extremely clear.

You have never written any of it down. You have never said one word of it to anybody. And you did not sit down at any point and decide to begin.

And it is the ledger that bothers you rather than the balance.

You would say, and you would mean it, that you do not want anything back from those people. You are not waiting for anything. If somebody offered you the missing half you would be embarrassed.

And yet there it is, itemized, retrievable, in perfect order, in a woman who never wanted it.

Let me say clearly, before anything else, that nothing here suggests giving produces return of any kind. Not from them, not from God, not ever. That is not what this site does.

Thinketh no evil

Here is the line, in the middle of the most quoted passage in the book.

Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil. (1 Corinthians 13:5, King James Version)

Thinketh no evil. That phrase is doing something much more specific than it sounds in English.

It is a bookkeeping expression. It means does not enter it in the account, does not reckon it up, does not maintain a record of the wrong.

You have been keeping exactly the thing that phrase names, and the Holy Spirit is the one who used a bookkeeping word in the middle of that passage. 1 Corinthians 13:5 describes charity as not entering things in an account rather than as forgiving them afterward, and He used it because the problem is the ledger rather than the feeling.

And notice what comes just before it.

Seeketh not her own. Does not go after what belongs to it. Does not pursue the thing it is owed, and by extension does not track what it is owed either.

Those two phrases sit beside each other on purpose. Not pursuing and not recording are the same discipline described from two directions.

You have been doing one and not the other, and it is written that charity seeketh not her own and thinketh no evil rather than that it merely declines to collect. The Spirit of God is the one who put those next to each other, and they are next to each other because one leads to the other.

And here is the relief in it, which is real.

The passage is not saying a loving woman feels nothing when she is overlooked. There is nothing in that chapter about feelings at all.

It describes what charity does. And what it does is decline to open the book.

You are not being asked to feel differently about anything, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put it in terms a person can actually do something about. The written word describes an action rather than an emotion, and a book can be closed.

How a ledger starts

Now let me say how this one began, because it keeps getting treated as a character fault and it is not one.

A ledger does not start with a decision. It starts with a good memory and a long run of years.

You remember things. That is not a moral quality, it is how you are built, and it has served you well everywhere else in your life. And eleven years of doing a thing gives a good memory an enormous amount of material.

You have been running a memory rather than a grievance, and it is written that the not reckoning is what charity does rather than that a good memory is a fault. The Spirit of God is the one who separates how a woman is built from what she has become, and this has never been the second one.

And here is the specific mechanism, which is worth seeing.

The account was not opened by a decision to count. It was opened the first time you noticed. And noticing is involuntary, and once a thing has been noticed twice, the mind files it and starts a column without asking.

You have a column that opened itself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a woman that the noticing was never the problem. His word names the reckoning as the thing love declines rather than as the thing love never notices, and it was not.

And one more thing, and it is the one that has been hardest.

You do not want anything from those people, and you have not been lying about that, and both things can be true at once. A person can hold an account they have no intention of ever calling in.

You are able to be honest about both of those, and it is written that charity thinketh no evil rather than that it never has anything to think about. The Spirit of God is the one who lets a woman stop arguing with herself about whether she is bitter, and you are not.

Write it out, and then destroy it

So here is what to do, and it is going to sound like the opposite of the instruction.

Write the whole thing down. All of it. Names, dates, what you gave, what came back, and the gap.

Not to keep. Write it out so it exists somewhere outside you for about four minutes.

You are able to put it on paper for four minutes, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is willing for a thing to be looked at before it is put down. 1 Corinthians 13:5 names the reckoning rather than pretending it is not there, and He does not require anybody to pretend first.

Then read it once, all the way through, and notice what it actually is.

It is short. That is what surprises everybody who does this. A thing that feels like eleven years of evidence is usually about nine lines long, and reading nine lines takes most of the weight out of it.

You have far less on the page than in your head, and it is written that charity does not enter it in the account rather than that the account is enormous. The Spirit of God is the one who shows a woman the actual size of a thing, and the actual size is nearly always smaller.

And then destroy the paper. Properly.

Tear it up or burn it. Do not put it in a drawer, do not keep it to look at, and do not photograph it first, which is exactly what a woman with a good memory will think of doing.

You are able to close it rather than file it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a physical act do something in a place that has no sentences in it. Scripture names the not reckoning as an act rather than as a state of mind, and this is one of those places.

And when the column tries to reopen, and it will, say one thing.

That account is closed. Not: I do not mind. Not: it does not matter. Those are arguments and the column does not use arguments. Say that it is closed, which is a fact about something you did, and go back to what you were doing.

You are able to state a fact rather than win an argument, and it is written that charity thinketh no evil rather than that it talks itself round. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a closed thing stay closed, and He does it a little more each time it is said.