The List of Names She Carries

It is in her purse, behind the card for the chiropodist, folded twice, and it has been rewritten three times because the paper wore through at the crease.

Eleven names. Two are her brothers. One is a woman she worked beside for nineteen years. One is her husband's cousin who she never even liked very much and who she cannot leave off, and one is a boy from her street who died at nineteen in a car a very long time ago, whose mother she still sees at the shops.

She is eighty six years old and she has outlived nearly everybody, and this is the list of the ones she does not know about.

She does not pray it, exactly. She takes it out sometimes and looks at it and puts it away. Occasionally she adds somebody, which is the part she has begun to find frightening, because the list only ever goes one way.

Her granddaughter found it once, looking for a bus pass, and asked what it was, and she said it was nothing and took it back and has never mentioned it since.

Here is the thing she has never said to a living soul. She is not sure she is allowed to stop carrying it. Somewhere in her it has become a duty. As though as long as somebody is still holding these eleven names, something has not been given up on, and if she puts the paper down then she is the one who let go.

Eighty six years old and afraid to stop.

Sit down at the table. Nobody is going to take that paper off you.

The word David used

There is a sentence used at the end of a life and it is the exact word for the thing that list is reaching for. The Spirit put it in the book and then let Christ use it out loud at the very end.

Into your hand I commit my spirit; you have redeemed me, O LORD, faithful God.Psalm 31:5

Commit. That is a handing over. It is the word for putting something into somebody's keeping and not standing next to it afterward, and it is the word Christ used from the cross, quoting this psalm, at the very end.

The psalm is not a death bed prayer originally. David wrote it in trouble, in the middle of his life, about being surrounded and worn out. He is not committing his spirit because he is finished. He is committing it because he has run out of ability to hold it himself.

That is your position with the eleven names, and it is not a lesser thing than carrying them. Nothing written anywhere ranks committing below holding, and the Spirit does not read a handover as a woman losing interest.

You are permitted to commit what you cannot keep. Psalm 31:5 is a man putting into God's hand something he could not hold any longer, and the Spirit kept those words in the book and then let Christ Himself use them out loud.

Carrying is not the same as keeping

Now the fear, because it is a real one and deserves a proper answer rather than a pat.

You believe that if you put the paper down, something gets given up on. That is a serious thought and it comes from love rather than from superstition, and it is still not true.

The list is not what is holding those eleven people. If it were, then everybody who was ever forgotten by everybody would be lost, and God would be running on a system of human memory, and nothing in Scripture describes anything remotely like that. He is described as the one who knows the heart, who searches, who is not willing that any should perish.

You were never the mechanism. That is written all through, and the Spirit has been keeping those eleven people in view without any assistance from a folded piece of paper in a purse.

Nobody on that paper is being held there by you. What is written puts the keeping in God's hands rather than in a woman's purse, and the Spirit is not depending on an eighty six year old to remember a boy who died in a car so that he stays remembered.

And here is the gentler half of it. The love in that list is real and it is not wasted and nothing here is telling you to feel less. What is being suggested is only that you stop treating it as a duty you could fail at.

What to do with the paper

Here is the practical part, and it is not to throw it away.

Take it out. Read the eleven names out loud, once, slowly, which has probably never been done. Then say the sentence from the psalm, out loud, with the paper in your hand: into Your hand I commit them.

Then put it back in your purse if you want it there. That is allowed. The paper is not the problem, the duty is.

You are handing over rather than giving up. Nothing written anywhere treats committing something to God as abandonment of it, and the Spirit does not read a handover as a woman losing interest in eleven people she has loved for sixty years.

And if you add another name next year, do the same thing with it, on the day you add it. That turns the frightening part into the settled part.

And notice what the psalm does not ask of you. It does not require you to feel differently about any of the eleven. It does not ask you to be at peace, or to have concluded anything, or to stop thinking about the boy in the car. Committing something is an action rather than a mood, and it can be done on a bad afternoon by somebody who is not feeling anything in particular, which is one of the great mercies of the way God arranged prayer.