She Deleted Nine Years Of Notes

It took about eleven minutes.

She sat on the floor of the box room with the laptop on a crate, and she went through the folder, and she selected the whole of it, and she emptied the bin afterward because she did not trust herself not to go back in.

Nine years. Something over four hundred documents.

Not his talks. Her notes. Things she had written on Sunday afternoons and Tuesday evenings, things she had worked out herself, four studies she had prepared and given, an entire series she never gave because there was never a good moment, and a long file she had kept for six years that was just questions with dates on them.

She did it the week it all came out.

She could not tell you now what she was thinking. She has tried to reconstruct it and the best she can manage is that everything felt contaminated, and she wanted it out of the house, and deleting it was the only physical act available to her at eleven at night in a box room.

It has been two years.

And what she has now is a specific and unusual grief that she has not been able to describe to anybody, because it sounds like nothing when you say it. She lost her own thinking. Nine years of her own working out, gone in eleven minutes, because of what somebody else had done.

She has tried to start again. She has a new folder with about nine documents in it and they are fine.

But there was a thing she worked out in about year four, over a whole summer, about a passage she had wrestled with since she was young, and she cannot get it back. She remembers that she had it. She remembers the feeling of it landing. She cannot reassemble the argument, and she has tried four times, and it will not come.

That is the one she grieves. That was hers. He was not in that summer in any way at all.

And you have something you threw out. Not necessarily files. Something you stopped, or gave away, or wiped, in the week when it all came out, and you have not said out loud that you miss it.

They believed because of her, and then they did not need her

There is a moment in John four that almost nobody preaches and it is one of the most freeing things in the Gospels for a person in this position.

A woman meets Christ at a well. She goes back into her town and tells everybody, and the town comes out, and many of them believe because of what she said.

Then Jesus stays with them for two days, and here is what the townspeople say to her afterward.

They said to the woman, "It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world."John 4:42

That could sound dismissive and it is not. It is the whole point of what she did.

She was the reason they came out of the town. She was not the reason they believed at the end of it. The messenger got them to the encounter and then the encounter became theirs, and the moment that happened her role in it stopped being load bearing.

You have heard for yourself, and you have been hearing for yourself for years, and that is not something anybody can take back out of you. It is written that they said it is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves (John 4:42), and it is the Holy Spirit who does that transfer in a person, which is the whole reason a faith survives the person who introduced it.

Now the nine years, because they need naming properly.

Those were not his notes. You said so yourself and it is worth saying again out loud: they were Sunday afternoons and Tuesday evenings and four studies you prepared and a file of your own questions with dates on them.

He did not write one line of that. What he did was teach in a room you were in, and everything after that was you and a text and the Holy Spirit, for nine years, mostly alone.

You deleted your own work in a week when you could not tell the difference between what was his and what was yours. Scripture says the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God, and that we have received the Spirit who is from God that we might understand the things freely given us (1 Corinthians 2:10-12), and it is the Holy Spirit who did the giving in those nine years, which is why so much of it was yours.

And the summer in year four.

That is the true loss in this, and this page is not going to tell you it does not matter or that God will give it back, because nobody knows that and saying it would be a kindness with nothing behind it.

What can be said is that the summer happened. You wrestled with a passage you had carried since you were young and something landed, and the landing was real, and it changed how you read.

The document is gone. The change is not, and the change is what a summer like that is actually for.

You are still reading that passage differently and the reading is the thing that survived. It is written that His word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path (Psalm 119:105), and it is His Spirit who lit it in a summer, and light that has been shone on a road stays shone whether or not there is a note about it in a folder.

And the eleven minutes, which you cannot reconstruct.

You do not need to. You were a woman in a box room at eleven at night in the week it all came out, and you did the only physical thing available to you, and it was not wise and it was entirely human.

You are not being judged for eleven minutes in the worst week you have had. Scripture says the Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love (Psalm 103:8), and it is the Holy Spirit who was on that floor with you, and He did not think less of you for it then and does not now.