I Have Never Made My Own List

It is a good evening and she is proud of it and she will say so.

Eleven years. Second Thursday in November, always, because that is the week people start to feel the year turning. Chairs in rows and then, halfway through, chairs into circles, because she learned in about year three that you cannot ask people to say a thing like this in rows.

She does the cards. Card and a pen for everyone, and the instruction is the same every year and she has never improved on it: write down three ordinary things God has already done for you, and nobody is going to read it but you.

It works. She has watched it work for eleven years. She has seen a man of about seventy cry over a card in year six and she has never mentioned it to anybody.

And tonight she is at the sink at the back with her sleeves up, doing the cups, and everybody has gone, and she is thinking about how well it went.

And then, entirely out of nowhere, with a cup in her hand: I have never filled one in.

Not once. Eleven years of handing them out and eleven years of walking round with the box while other people wrote, and she has never in her life sat down and written three things on one of her own cards.

And she stands there with the water running and thinks: is that because I am busy, or is it because I would not know what to put?

And you know that exactly, because there is something you have given other people access to for years and have never once had yourself.

The one who hands out the pens

Let us settle what governs this whole page. Nothing on it is being asked of you, there is no appeal at the bottom, and nobody here is going to write your card for you.

You are looking at an invitation, and the One being tested inside it is God. Follow the verb in the famous sentence and it lands on Him. He is under examination. He is the one who offered to be found out. It is written, and thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts (Malachi 3:10), and it is the Holy Spirit, not this page, who takes the sentence back off the people who borrowed it.

Here it is, in its own room:

Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.Malachi 3:10

Said to a nation, in one decade, about one building, where the store room had emptied and the families who worked there had gone home hungry. It is a sentence about people eating, and it was never a lever.

And here is what belongs on this page.

God had already been faithful to those people for centuries before He ever invited them to test Him, and He was already faithful to you long before you ran your first November. That invitation sits at the end of a long book, spoken to people whose whole story is a record of what He had already done. The test was never the beginning of His faithfulness. It was a nudge to notice what was already there. It is the Holy Spirit, and not this page, who takes that and stands it at a sink at half past nine.

Now the eleven years, and they deserve honesty rather than praise.

Nobody here is going to tell you that not filling one in is selfless. You have run a good thing for eleven years and it has done real work in real people, and none of that is in question. But there is a difference between serving a room and being outside it, and you felt which one it was tonight with a cup in your hand.

And nobody is going to call it ingratitude either. If anybody has ever implied that a person who cannot name their three has a problem with thankfulness, they were wrong, and it was unkind.

Forgetting is the ordinary condition of a person, and God has never once been surprised by it. It is written, bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits (Psalm 103:2), and notice that it is a person speaking to themselves, out loud, because they could not be relied on to remember without being told. That is not a rebuke of you. That is a description of everybody, including the woman with the box of cards.

And here is the passage for somebody who has always been the one asking.

He asked them. When I sent you out with no purse, He said, did you lack anything? And they said, nothing (Luke 22:35).

Somebody had to put the question. Even to them. Even after three years. The answer was there the whole time and it did not come out until He asked, and He asked because it is a thing people do not do for themselves.

Which is exactly what you have been doing for eleven years for everybody except you.

You are not being asked to feel grateful, you are being asked to sit down with a card, and those are two different things. It is written that you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you (Deuteronomy 8:2), and it is addressed to each person about their own way. His Spirit is the one who makes that a chair in the circle rather than a job at the side of it.

Now the guardrails, and they are why this page will not help as much as you might want.

Nobody here is going to name your three, because three of somebody else's is precisely what you have been holding for eleven years.

And nobody is going to turn them into a pattern. When you have them they will not predict your year, they are not a system, and they do not add up to anything except three things that happened. That is enough, and it is the same instruction you have been giving other people since year one. It is the Holy Spirit, not this page, who carries a sentence like that out of its own century and sets it down where you are standing.

God proved Himself to you long before you ever ran an evening about it, and the finding out is looking rather than earning. It is written that He is the same yesterday and today and forever (Hebrews 13:8), so whatever ends up on your card is not a run of luck. It is the same Person who has been in the room every November.