Six Spines and a Bookmark

She is standing in front of her own bookshelf at twenty past nine with a cloth in her hand, and she stopped dusting about four minutes ago.

Six spines. She could say what each one promised without opening a single one. The first has a subtitle about ancient wisdom. The second is by a man with a very white smile on the back cover and it is the only one she finished. The third and the fourth arrived in the same week, because she found the second one thin and thought perhaps she had bought the wrong sort. The fifth was recommended by a woman at work who has since moved on to something else entirely. The sixth she bought in March, three days after a phone call about a boiler she could not replace, and it is the newest and the most expensive and the bookmark is in chapter three.

Chapter three. She has been in chapter three since March.

Here is the part she does not tell anybody. Her friend borrowed the second one for a fortnight and gave it back saying it was good, actually, and she felt something go through her like being caught. Not caught reading it. Caught needing it. Caught being the sort of woman who buys six of these, who wants the key badly enough to keep paying strangers for one, at her age, with her Bible on the same shelf, one row down.

That is the feeling she is standing in with the cloth in her hand. Not curiosity. Shame. And the shame is why she has not thrown any of them out, because throwing them out would be a decision, and the decision would say something about the last four years.

You know that shelf. Yours may be a list of podcasts, a playlist you never finish, a folder called Finance on your phone, a set of notes from a weekend that cost you a Saturday and a half of your wages. Yours may not have cost you anything but time. But you know the small flinch when somebody mentions one of them out loud in a room, and you know exactly what that flinch is made of.

Come and sit down. Put the cloth down. I have something to say and it is God's own words, not mine, and He says it about Himself.

There is no code, and He said so Himself

Let me say the plain thing at the top, because the name over the door of this site promises a secret and I will not hold a hungry woman with a hint for one more paragraph.

There is no code. Not in Hebrew, not in a numbered system, not in a room, not in a book with a good cover. There is no arrangement of words about money that God has kept back from you and released to somebody with a microphone. And I am not saying that to shame anybody who wrote one or anybody who bought one, and I am not going to spend your evening being angry at people I have never met. I am saying it because God said it about Himself, out loud, in the first person, and once you have heard Him say it you cannot unhear it.

I have not spoken in secret, in a dark place of the earth: I said not unto the seed of Jacob, Seek ye me in vain: I the LORD speak righteousness, I declare things that are right.Isaiah 45:19

Listen to what He is doing there. He is not being asked. Nobody has put the question to Him. He volunteers it. He says: I have not spoken in secret. He says: I did not tell my people to seek me and then hide. He says: I declare. That is a public word. That is a word said at volume in daylight to whoever is standing there.

You are not seeking Him in vain, and He has never spoken about you in a dark corner. That is not a warm thing I decided to say to a woman with a cloth in her hand. That is the LORD's own written sentence about His own conduct, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line spoken through a prophet and stands it up in a living room at twenty past nine.

You have a God who declares, and everything He has ever said about His people He said where they could hear it. Scripture calls Him the one who speaks righteousness, and His Spirit is the one who makes an ancient declaration land on a body rather than pass over a mind.

Now let me get to the real thing, because we are not actually talking about books.

That flinch when your friend handed the book back. Go and look at it properly. It was not embarrassment about reading. It was the fear that your hunger is evidence of something. That wanting the key so badly proves you have been doing this wrong for years, that other women your age are settled and you are still looking, that the boiler phone call in March exposed a gap in you that God has noticed too.

Hear me. Hunger is not a defect. Hunger is the most reliable thing about you. It is what took you to the shelf and it is the same thing that has you standing here now, and it is not a mark against your name in heaven.

You are not disqualified by your own appetite, and God has never once held your hunger against you. Scripture says blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the word blessed and puts it exactly where the shame was sitting.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because shame does not leave a room because somebody was gentle with it. Jesus said that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what silent enduring never does. So open your mouth in your own front room. You have the standing to tell shame in your own house what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that your position rather than your prize, and the Holy Spirit carries a spoken word a great deal further than a living room wall.