The Date I Marked in the Margin

He has kept study notes in the same kind of notebook since he was twenty four.

Hardback, unruled, one for about every eight months, and there are more than forty of them in the cupboard behind him in date order. He writes the passage at the top and the date in the corner and then whatever comes. It is not a diary. It has never been a diary. It is a man working through a text with a pen.

Rivka died on the nineteenth of Shevat, which that year fell in February.

He wrote nothing for eleven weeks. The notebook has a gap in it that anybody flicking through would take for a lost book.

Then he started again, and when he came back round to the nineteenth the following year, he wrote the date at the top the way he always does, and then, in the margin, small, he wrote her name and the year.

He has done it four times now.

And here is what has happened, and it took him three of those four years to notice. He has started dreading the page.

Not the day. The day he can do. The day has a shape to it: there are people, there are things to say, there is a place to stand and something to read. The day is public and the day is arranged and he gets through the day.

The page is not arranged. The page is a Tuesday morning in his own study with a lamp on and a pen in his hand and a margin that is going to have to hold something.

Because now it is a record. Four entries. And when he opens the notebook to the place he can see, without meaning to, exactly what he wrote the other three times, and he can see what changed, and he can see that this year he has less to say than last year, and he does not know what that means, and there is a voice that is very sure it means something.

He put the pen down flat on the page last Tuesday and did not pick it up again.

If anybody has put a pen down like that, stay with me. There is a line in the ninetieth psalm that takes the ledger out of a man's hands entirely.

The numbering in that psalm is a request, not an audit

Everybody quotes this line. Almost nobody notices who is doing the counting.

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.Psalm 90:12

Teach us. It is a request, made to God, by a man who cannot do it himself. Moses is not writing a self assessment there. He is asking the eternal One to do something to him that he has no power to do on his own.

And notice what the numbering is for. Not accuracy. Not accounting. Wisdom, which in that psalm means a heart set right, and it comes as a gift at the end of a request, never as the result of a man auditing himself.

That matters at a desk with a lamp on, because what has been happening in that margin for four years is not numbering. It is auditing. It is a man reading his own entries back and grading the difference between them.

You are numbered by God rather than required to number yourself, and you were numbered through the eleven weeks when nothing at all got written. Psalm 90:12 is the written word asking the Lord to do the counting, and the Spirit who breathed that request is in a study at dusk when the pen goes down flat.

Now the verse before it, because the psalm is doing something people rush past. Moses has just said that the days of our years are threescore years and ten, and that they are soon cut off, and that we fly away. He is standing in front of the shortness of a life with nothing tidy to say about it. He does not resolve it. He asks to be taught.

The psalm sits in that unresolved place on purpose and the Holy Spirit put it in the book that way.

You have permission from the ninetieth psalm itself to sit at an open notebook with nothing resolved, and you were never asked to close that page with a conclusion in it. Psalm 90:10 goes straight from a life cut off to a request for teaching without a single answer in between, and the same Spirit is not standing behind a chair waiting for a better paragraph.

The margin is a mark, not a measurement

Let me name the voice, because it has been at that desk for three years and it has never once been challenged out loud.

It says the entries are getting shorter. It says the first year filled half a page and this year there is a line and a half. It says a man who has less to write has less to feel, and a man who has less to feel has begun to let her go.

That is not the Holy Spirit. That has never been the Holy Spirit.

Nothing in Scripture ever grades a mourner by volume. There is no place in the whole book where the length of what a man says about his dead is treated as evidence of anything at all. Jacob mourned Rachel and the record gives it a pillar and a place name and moves on. David's whole lament for Jonathan is a few lines of poetry. Nobody counts.

And here is the plain fact about what he has been writing. That margin is a marker. It is the same thing as a stone on a road. A stone does not get bigger to prove the road still matters, and it does not shrink into an insult when a man walks past it without stopping.

You are not filing a report in that margin, and you were never required to make this year's entry match last year's. Genesis 35:20 has a pillar set on a grave with no measurement attached to it anywhere, and the Spirit of God does not read a study notebook looking for a decline.

Nobody gets to tell you what the page should hold

Now the hard part, which is the part where I do not help.

I am not going to tell anybody what to write in that margin this year.

Write her name. Write nothing. Write half a page. Write the date and close the book. Skip the notebook entirely that morning and take a walk instead. Start a different notebook. Every one of those is a real thing a real man might do, and every one of them, handed over as counsel, turns a Tuesday morning into an assignment with a mark at the end of it.

And I want to say this one out loud because I think it is the one he needs. If the page stays blank this year, that has taken nothing away from her. A blank margin is not a verdict. It is a Tuesday when a man opened a notebook and did not have words, and there is no obligation anywhere in heaven or earth that says he owes that page a sentence.

You are free in your own study in a way nobody who knows you would ever think to say to you, and you were free in the eleven weeks when the notebook had a gap in it. Romans 14:5 leaves the keeping of a day to a man's own mind before God and gives no one else a vote, and the Holy Spirit does not overrule a widower's own conscience about his own wife's date.