A Photograph Is Not a Summons

The glass bank at the recycling center takes a jar with a sound like a small accident, and there are eleven people in the queue and every one of them is used to it except him.

Saturday morning. Hi-vis at the gate, a man in front with a boot full of cardboard, a woman behind with two children who are throwing bottles in for the joy of the noise. He has a box of jars in both hands, his wife's jam jars, months of them, and he has carried it from the car to the bank the way he carries everything now, plainly, a man doing an ordinary thing on an ordinary Saturday, which is the whole of what he asks for these days.

Then the child ahead of him drops a bottle on the concrete instead of in the bank, and it goes.

That sound. He is not at the recycling center. He is in his mother's kitchen, on the night that nobody in the family mentions, and the sound is the same sound, and his arm will not lift the box. The queue moves and he does not. The woman behind him says something kind about the weight, and he nods, and he is still in the kitchen, and the thing about that kitchen is that he has never once, in all this sober time, been able to look straight at what he did in it. Not with his counselor. Not with God. He goes round it. He has learned to feel it coming and go round it, and here in a queue with a box of jars it has come up the middle of him and there is no round.

You know that box. Yours has a different sound in it, a different kitchen, a different night, and you have been sober long enough that most of it can be looked at now, and there is still the one thing. The one you go round. The one that, on a Saturday morning with your arms full and strangers behind you, can stop you dead in a queue and make you doubt that any of what you have built since is real.

You are carrying a memory and you were never carrying a charge, and the difference is the whole of this. Colossians 2:14 says the record that stood against you was blotted out and nailed to the cross, and that is exactly what stands written; the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a canceled document read as canceled in a queue at a glass bank on a Saturday morning.

What was nailed up, and what was not

I read Scripture the way I read a set of drawings, and I want to show you what is actually written on the sheet, because the thing that has been crushing you is not on it.

When Paul writes to Colossae about what happened at the cross, he does not use a feeling word. He uses a legal one, and a builder's one. There was a record, he says. A written thing, a charge sheet, a list of debts that stood against us with its demands. And God did a specific thing with it.

And you, who were dead in your trespasses, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by cancelling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.Colossians 2:13-14

Read what got nailed. Not you. The record. The document that named the night in the kitchen and every other night, and stood against you, and had every legal right to. That is what He took down and nailed to the wood, in public, where a thing nailed up is a thing declared finished. Not hidden. Not filed. Canceled, and nailed where everyone could see it was canceled.

You have no record standing against you, and the night you cannot look at is on a sheet that was nailed to the cross before you were born. That is what the written word says, and it is the Holy Spirit who lifts that sentence off a page in Colossae and puts it into a man's hands at a glass bank. It is not my saying it that does anything. It is His Spirit carrying what God already did.

Now hear what was not nailed up, because this is the seam where you have been tearing yourself, and I want to close it. The record was canceled. The memory was not erased. Nothing on that sheet promises that you would forget the kitchen. What it promises is that the kitchen has no legal standing any more. Those are different things, and the whole weight you have carried comes from treating them as one thing: you still remember, so it must not be forgiven, or it is forgiven and you are failing by remembering. Neither is true. A canceled charge you can still recall is exactly what forgiveness looks like from inside a human head.

A photograph is not a summons

Here is how a builder holds it, and I offer it because it has held me.

When a job is finished there is a file. In that file there are photographs of every defect that was ever found: the crack, the wrong fixing, the thing that had to be taken down and done again. The photographs stay in the file. They are true. The defect happened. And on the front of the file there is a certificate, signed, that says the building is complete and accepted, and that certificate is not made false by one photograph of a crack that was fixed. The photograph is history. The certificate is standing.

Your memory of that night is a photograph. It is real, and it is not going away, and it does not have to. But it is not a summons. It cannot reopen the file. It cannot put you back in the dock, because the dock was dismantled at the cross and the charge sheet went up on the wood.

You are carrying a photograph, and you are not being summoned, and God is the one who says so. He said it in Isaiah in the plainest words He ever used about the past: I, I am He who blots out your transgressions for My own sake, and I will not remember your sins (Isaiah 43:25). For My own sake. Not because you earned it and not because you have stopped remembering. And it is His Spirit who whispers that verse over the box of jars, not so that you forget the kitchen, but so that the kitchen stops being allowed to tell you who you are.

And hear me on one thing that is not mine to touch. Whether anything about that night ever needs saying to anyone else is between you, God, and the people whose counsel you trust: your counselor, your honest friend, whoever sits with you in this. This article cannot see your kitchen and does not pretend to, and it will not tell you to walk back into it. What it can tell you is that God is not waiting at the door of that kitchen with the charge sheet. He nailed it up.

Where the past gets its vote

The past has been voting on your Saturdays. That is the actual mechanics of what happened at the glass bank: a memory rose, and it did not merely hurt, it ruled. It decided for a minute what name to call you by, and whether the sober years counted, and whether you had any business standing in a queue like an ordinary man.

Paul says something about that too, in the same letter, that you have put off the old self with its practices and put on the new self, which is being renewed (Colossians 3:9-10). Being renewed. Present tense, continuous, His work and not yours. The old self is not who is standing at the glass bank. It is a photograph in the file of a man who has been made new.

You are God's, right now, in this queue, and the past does not have a vote on today. That is the written word, the record canceled and the new self put on, and it is the Spirit of God who is doing the renewing in you at this hour, whatever the sound of glass just did to your arm. The memory may come up the middle of you again on some other Saturday. When it does, it comes as a photograph, and you are allowed to look at it, and set it down, and pick the box back up.