The List That Gets Longer Every Year

The pharmacy bag is still on the counter where she set it down last night, folded over twice at the top, stapled shut through the little printed slip they always staple on. Six forty in the morning. The light over the sink is the only one she has bothered to turn on. The kettle is working itself up behind her, and she is standing at the counter with the plastic organizer open, seven lids up in a row, Sunday through Saturday, the way she has filled it every Sunday night for nine years. She forgot on Sunday. So she is doing it now, on a Thursday, before work, in her housecoat, with her hair still flat on one side.

She takes the new bottle out of the bag. It is a small one. Thirty tablets, white, and the name on the label is longer than the name of the town she grew up in. She turns it once in her fingers and sets it at the end of the row.

That is when she sees it. The row is a row now. There was a time it was two bottles and a jar of vitamins beside the sugar.

There is an envelope in her purse with the list on it, because every single time she sits down in one of those rooms the nurse looks at the screen and says, and any changes to your medications? So she keeps it written out, in her own hand, so she is not standing there guessing at spellings with her coat in her lap. She gets the envelope out. She writes the new one at the bottom.

And she has to turn the envelope over, because there is no more room on the front.

She stands there with the pen still in her hand, looking at her own handwriting running down the back of an envelope, and she thinks a thing she has never once said in a room with people in it. Not to her husband. Not to the nurse. Not at church, ever.

She thinks: I am going the wrong way.

The kettle clicks off. She does not move.

And I am going to stop calling her she.

Because you have the envelope. Or the note in your phone, or the printout you have folded and unfolded so many times it has gone soft at the crease, and you know the exact year the list stopped being short. You have watched it grow a line at a time. Every new line came with a good reason and every good reason was true and none of that touches it, because underneath the reasons there is an arithmetic running in you all day that nobody else can hear.

One more. Longer than last year. Longer than the year before that.

You take them. You take every one of them, on time, the way you are supposed to, and you have never once been the kind of person who does not do what the doctor says. And still you stand at your own counter in the half dark before anybody else in the house is up, and you wonder, quietly, whether the One you have been praying to is counting the same column you are.

Come sit down. I want to tell you what that list is not.

The name He gave Himself at bitter water

I am not going to hurry past your column to get to the good part. It cost you something to write that last line, and I saw you turn the envelope over.

Here is what has been happening in you, and I want it said out loud because you have never said it. You have been reading that list as a scoreboard. Not on purpose. Nobody sat you down and taught you to do it. But a person cannot watch a number go one direction for fifteen years without their heart drawing a conclusion from it, and the conclusion your heart has drawn is that you are losing, slowly, in a game where nobody announces the score. That is not the Spirit's voice and it never was. Nothing written anywhere in Scripture keeps a person's score in tablets.

And underneath that there is a second thing, quieter and meaner, and it goes like this: if He were really healing me, the list would be getting shorter.

I want to take that sentence out of your hands. Not by arguing with you. By showing you where He first said His own name over this.

They had been out of Egypt three days. Three. Not three years, three days, and already the water they found was too bitter to drink, and they said so, loudly, the way tired people do. God showed Moses a tree. Moses put it in the water and the water went sweet. And then, standing over water that had just been made drinkable, God said something about Himself that He had not said before.

If you will diligently listen to the voice of the LORD your God, and do that which is right in his eyes, and give ear to his commandments, and keep all his statutes, I will put none of these diseases on you which I have put on the Egyptians: for I am the LORD who heals you.Exodus 15:26

Read the end of that sentence again, because the end is where He turns and tells them who He is.

He does not promise them a shorter list. He gives them a name. And a name is what somebody is when there is nothing left to negotiate. A trade you can lose. A name does not move.

Notice who He said it to. People who had been free for seventy two hours and had already complained at the first bad water they came to. He did not wait for them to improve. He did not scold them into health. He sweetened the water first, and named Himself afterward, and the naming was the point.

And notice the tree. He healed that water through something. He did not consider it beneath Him to use a means. He has never once been offended by a means.

So let me say the plain thing, once, and then I will not say it again: keeping your appointments and taking what is prescribed is not a lack of faith. It never was. Those tablets in that row are not evidence against you, and swallowing them is not a small daily act of unbelief, whatever that voice at six forty in the morning has been telling you. God works through hands. He always has. The people in that clinic with their good training are not His competition and they never were.

What I want you to see is that your list and His name are not measuring the same thing.

The list measures what your body is being helped with. It is a maintenance record. It says that somebody has been watching you carefully for fifteen years and adjusting as they went, and that is what care looks like when it is real and long and unglamorous.

His name measures who is in the room while all that happens. And He did not tell you He was the LORD who shortens lists. He told you He is the LORD who heals you, present tense, standing over bitter water, in a body of people who were nowhere near done complaining.

He is not tallying your column. He has been carrying you down the length of it. You are carried, and you were carried through every line on that envelope, including the ones you wrote sitting in a waiting room with your coat in your lap. Exodus 15:26 is where He gave Himself that name, and the Spirit keeps the tense present at your counter in the half dark.