Waiting for the Machine to Stop

The machine takes about forty seconds and for about thirty-eight of them conversation is not possible, so the two of them stand there, the customer and the man cutting, and they do what everybody does, which is watch the wheel.

Behind him, blanks. Hundreds of them, hanging in rows on little hooks, sorted by profile in a system that took him years to build and that nobody else in the world could use. The shop smells of hot brass and oil. There is a bell on the door that has been on that door since before he took the place on.

He hands it across warm and says try it before you go to bed, and if it sticks, bring it back, and there is no charge for a recut. Everybody who comes in here gets that sentence. He means it every time.

Twenty-nine years of doors that are not his. He has cut keys to houses on every street in this town and he could not tell you what is behind one of those doors, and that has never once bothered him. He likes the work. He likes the exactness of it.

What sits underneath is something else, and it is not a memory, it is a conclusion, and he reached it a very long time ago.

The conclusion is that what happened went unrecorded. Nobody wrote it down. Nobody was going to. There is no file anywhere in the world with it in, and therefore, and this is where the conclusion turns and bites, it has no standing anywhere except inside him, which is precisely why it has never once been settled and never will be.

Sit down here a minute. I am not going to ask you what it was. Not now, not later, not at the end of this. I will not ask you to say a word about it to any human being, ever. Nothing here wants the thing itself.

Three records in one verse, because once was not enough

There is a psalm written by a man who was, at the time of writing, in the hands of people who meant him harm. Not remembering it afterward from a safe room. In it.

And in the middle of it he says this.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?Psalm 56:8

Now count the record keeping in that one verse, because this is the thing almost nobody notices.

Thou tellest. That word is a counting word. It is what a shepherd does at a gate, one, two, three, out loud, keeping the number. God is counting the wanderings, the tossings, the times a man has been moved about against his will.

Put thou my tears into thy bottle. A vessel. Something kept, sealed, carried, not evaporated off a floor.

Are they not in thy book? A written record. Ink. A page with it on.

Three separate images of a thing being recorded, stacked one on top of another inside a single sentence.

Why three? Because the man writing it did not believe it. He needed it as a count, and then as a kept thing, and then as writing, and he still ends the line with a question mark, and God let the question mark stand in the Scripture rather than tidy it away.

You are recorded three different ways by a God who kept saying it because once was never going to be enough, and you were counted while it was happening rather than afterward. I am not offering you consolation there. The written word stacks three record keeping images in one verse on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a man who concluded decades ago that nothing was written.

An unrecorded thing and an unwitnessed thing are not the same

Here is the precision that matters, and precision is a mercy here rather than a coldness.

Your conclusion has a true half and a false half welded together, and they have been welded so long that they look like one piece.

The true half: no human being wrote it down. That may well be exactly right. There may be no statement, no note, no page in any office anywhere.

The false half: therefore it was not recorded.

Those do not follow, and the whole architecture of the last few decades has been built on the joint between them. Human record keeping is not the only record keeping there is, and it never was the primary one. It is the copy. The original was being kept while it was happening, by the only witness who was actually present for all of it.

You are held in a record that was being made in real time, and you were never depending on somebody having reached for a pen. Scripture calls Him the God who sees, named so by a woman nobody else was recording, and it is His Spirit, not a document, who makes a kept thing feel kept.