Four Januaries And Leviticus

There are four of them folded in the front of the black Bible and he found all four on the same night, looking for a receipt.

Each one is a grid. Three hundred and sixty five little boxes, printed off the church website, with the reading for each day in small type. And each one has ticks running along the top and then a place where the ticks stop.

The first one stops on the eleventh of February. The second on the sixth. The third on the nineteenth, which was a good year. The fourth stops on the second of February and has a coffee ring on it.

All four die in the same country. Somewhere in the back half of Exodus the ground gets soft, and then Leviticus arrives with its measurements and its blood and its skin diseases, and a man who reads pretty well and is not stupid finds himself reading the same paragraph three times at eleven at night and then not picking it up on Thursday.

He is fifty four. He has been a believer since he was twenty six.

And he said this to me on his own back step, in a voice with no self pity in it at all, which is what made it land: "I reckon I have read the first ninety pages of that book about eleven times and the rest of it not at all."

Then he said the part that matters. "I ain't going to start it again in January. There is no point. I know exactly where I get to."

That is a man who has quit, and he has quit for a reason that sounds like humility and is actually a piece of arithmetic he did wrong.

Seven times, and the counting is the point

There is a proverb about falling that most folks quote as though it were about resilience. Read what it actually reports.

For a just man falleth seven times, and riseth up again: but the wicked shall fall into mischief.Proverbs 24:16

Hear that on your own back step. You are a just man in the middle of a fall, and the word just is still attached to you. The word says he riseth up again, from where he is lying, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept you reaching for that book.

The just man falls seven times. Not once. Not with an explanation. Seven, and the word just is still attached to him at the end of the sentence.

The falling is not what the verse is interested in. The getting up is, and notice there is nothing in there about going back to the beginning. He rises up again from where he is lying, which is where a person always gets up from.

So take this on your step, and know it is not my kindness, it is what is written: you are a just man in the middle of a fall, right now, as you read this, and the standing was never on the chart. His word says the just man falls seven times and rises, and it is the Holy Spirit and not a row of ticks who bears witness that you belong to Him.

Four charts in the front of a black Bible is four risings waiting to happen, and you have been treating them as four verdicts.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who got met by God in a little room he did not want to be in, and wrote that his heart was strangely warmed. Everybody quotes that. What he did next was build a timetable, and he rode a quarter of a million miles on the back of it, preaching in fields and mine yards and prisons for fifty years.

Here is the part for you. The practices he built were small on purpose.

Small groups meeting at a set hour. A few plain questions asked out loud. A short reading, not a marathon. The people in those rooms were laborers and servant girls who could not read fast and had no candles to spare, and the whole thing was designed so that a woman with fourteen hours of work in her day could keep it.

The name that got hung on them was a joke about how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method goes cold. A method with no warmth is a timetable and nothing else. He held both, and the method survived because it was built for a bad week, not a good one.

That chart was not built for a bad week. It was built for a man with an hour and a clear head every night of the year, and there is no such man anywhere, and you have measured yourself against him four times.