Thirty Years of Receipts

The box lives on the shelf in the back room, and it is a shoebox, and Delphia Runyon can tell you within a minute where anything in it is.

She is the one in that family who keeps things. When the furnace went out and the man wanted to argue about the warranty, Delphia went to the back room and came out with the slip in ninety seconds and the man stopped arguing. When her son-in-law needed to prove when the transmission was put in, she had it. Roof, well pump, the storm door, both stoves, the year they had the whole side of the house resided after the hail. Thirty years of slips, folded, dated in the corner in her own small hand, in order, in a shoebox with a rubber band around it.

She is not proud of it exactly. She grew up in a house where you did not throw away paper, and it turned into a habit, and the habit turned into her being useful, and being useful is most of what she has thought about herself for a long while.

Then in the spring her granddaughter Marlie came out from town with a school assignment. She had to interview an older relative, and she had a list of questions on a folded sheet, and she got through the easy ones fine. Where were you born. What did your daddy do. What was the first car.

Then she said: what is the best thing that ever happened to you.

Delphia opened her mouth to answer and nothing came. And then, without deciding to, she got up and went to the back room, because that is where things are kept, and she stood in front of the shelf with her hand on the shoebox before she understood what she was doing.

She stood there a while.

She could have told that girl to the dollar what the roof cost the year Marlie's mother started school. She could have told her the exact week the well pump was replaced and the name of the man who did it. There was not one thing in that box about God.

And it was not because nothing had happened. That was the part that got her, standing there in the back room with her hand on a lid. Things had happened. There had been a night with a fever that broke around four in the morning when it had no business breaking. There had been a stretch of about six weeks after her husband's layoff that she still could not account for. There had been a woman she barely knew who turned up at her door with a covered dish on the one day of one week when Delphia was closer to the floor than anybody ever knew.

She knew all of that. She had just never once written any of it down, and thirty years is long enough for a thing you know to go soft at the edges, and she could no longer have told you the month of any of it.

She carried the box back out to the kitchen and set it on the table in front of Marlie, and she did not open it. She said, honey, I can tell you what everything in this house cost. I cannot tell you the month God met me in that kitchen, and He did.

That night, after the girl had gone home, Delphia took the rubber band off, took out the oldest slip in the box, turned it over, and wrote four words and a month on the back of it in pen.

Then she put it back in with the rest.

Why the box has no God in it

Nobody ever told you to keep that record. That is the first thing, and I want it said before anything else, because the temptation right now is to hear this as one more thing you should have been doing and were not.

You kept receipts because somebody taught you to keep receipts. Nobody taught you to date a mercy. It was not in the curriculum. So there are thirty years of one kind of record in that box and none of the other, and that is not carelessness, it is simply what somebody handed you.

But it has cost you something, and it is worth naming what.

O God, thou hast taught me from my youth: and hitherto have I declared thy wondrous works. Now also when I am old and grayheaded, O God, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to every one that is to come.Psalm 71:17-18

An old man wrote that. Look at what he is actually asking for. Not comfort. Not relief. Time, so he can show it, so that the strength he has seen gets handed to a generation that was not there.

You are already holding what that psalm calls the strength of God, and it has been in you the whole time, undated. Psalm 71:18 says the point of an old life is that it hands something over, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a night when a fever broke at four in the morning and refuses to let it be filed under coincidence forever.

Small, dated, ordinary

Now hear the thing that has been quietly stopping you, because I know it is there.

You think the entry has to be worth writing. Somewhere along the line you got the idea that a record of God's works means the big ones: the medical report that turned around, the money that arrived in the mail, the story that makes a room go quiet. And measured against that standard there is nothing worth putting down, so nothing has been put down, and thirty years have gone by.

Read the verse again. He says thy wondrous works, and he does not itemize. And look at what the people of God actually put up as memorials. A pile of ordinary creek rocks. A stone with a plain name on it, set up because hitherto hath the LORD helped us, which is not a headline. It is a woman's honest sentence about a Tuesday.

You have thirty years of God's help in you and not one line of it in the box, and Scripture says a heap of common stones was enough to do the job, in Joshua 4, with the Holy Spirit making the small true thing carry exactly as much as anybody needs it to carry. The covered dish counts. The six weeks you cannot account for counts. Write the small one.

What a written date does that a memory cannot

There is a reason the instruction is always to write it, and it is not sentimental.

A memory adjusts. Not out of dishonesty, but because a memory has to live in the same head as everything that came after it, and it takes on the color of that. Nine bad years will quietly repaint a good Tuesday. A date on a page will not repaint. It sits there in your own handwriting, unchanged, and it can be handed to a girl doing a school assignment forty years from now, and it will say the same thing then that it says today.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?Psalm 56:8

That is God keeping a record of a man's crying, itemized, in a book. He is not above bookkeeping. He does it Himself, and He does it about small things, and the reason to write yours down is not to inform Him. It is to stop you from having to argue with your own memory in your ninth bad month.

You were seen on every one of those undated days, and it is written that He counts wanderings and keeps tears in a book, in Psalm 56:8, and His Spirit does not need your notebook to remember what He did. The notebook is for you, and for Marlie.