The Card In Her Handwriting

Ansel had made his mother's biscuits eleven times and every one of them came out like a door stop.

He had the box. It was a green metal recipe box with a dent in the lid from something that happened before he was born, and it came to him in the spring along with two lamps and a chest freezer full of things he was going to have to deal with eventually.

The card was near the front, under B, gone soft and brown at the corners the way a card gets when it has been handled with wet hands for forty years.

He could read it. That was never the problem. Two cups, half a teaspoon, a scant something, cut in the shortening, buttermilk to hold it together, hot oven. Nine lines. He is a man who reads instructions carefully, and he had followed all nine of them eleven times, and eleven times he had produced something you could have used to level a table.

And every single time, standing at that counter, he heard the card in a certain voice.

Not her voice. That is the thing he did not understand for months. It was a voice that said, well, this is not that hard, and everybody else in this family can do it. It was the voice he had heard in the seventh grade when a page came back with red on it, and the voice from the shop floor when a man half his age explained a thing twice, and the voice that showed up any time in fifty one years that Ansel Combs was handed something to follow.

Nobody had put that voice on the card. He was supplying it himself, and had been for so long he could not hear it as separate from the words.

The twelfth time, he was waiting on the oven and he was tired and he picked the card up sideways.

And there they were. The margins.

Pencil, faint, running up the right hand edge, in handwriting he would have known anywhere: don't work it much. it don't like handling.

Along the bottom, in a different pen, from some other year: if the stove runs hot move it down a shelf.

Up the left side, sideways, tiny: this is enough for the porch. double it for company.

And at the very bottom corner, in ballpoint, pressed hard enough to emboss the back of the card:

Don't fret if they're ugly. They'll eat good.

Ansel stood in his mother's kitchen and laughed out loud, once, and then he could not see the card for a minute and had to set it down.

Nine lines of instruction. Four notes in the margins. And every one of those notes was somebody leaning over his shoulder trying to hand him a thing she had loved, and not one of them was a grade.

The twelfth batch was ugly. He ate four of them at the counter with butter, standing up.

They were fine. They were better than fine.

The margins are the whole card

There is a passage that says out loud what Ansel found sideways in pencil, and it has been sitting in Proverbs the entire time.

My son, keep thy father's commandment, and forsake not the law of thy mother: Bind them continually upon thine heart, and tie them about thy neck. When thou goest, it shall lead thee; when thou sleepest, it shall keep thee; and when thou awakest, it shall talk with thee. For the commandment is a lamp; and the law is light; and reproofs of instruction are the way of life.Proverbs 6:20-23

Four things in there are worth more than any argument anybody is currently having about the subject.

It is a father's and it is a mother's. Not a board's. Not an inspector's. The instruction in that verse comes out of a house, from two people who want the child to have what they have.

It leads, it keeps, and it talks with you. When you go, it goes in front. When you sleep, it stands watch. And when you wake up, it has something to say to you, which is a strange thing to write about a rulebook and an ordinary thing to write about company.

It is a lamp. A lamp is not a bar you clear. A lamp is a thing you carry so you can see where the step is, and nobody in the history of the world has ever been graded on a lamp.

And the older word underneath our word law, right there in that verse, is much closer to teaching than to legislation. It is what a parent hands a child.

You are holding a lamp and not a scorecard, and you have been holding one all along. Proverbs 6:23 says commandment is a lamp and law is light. The Holy Spirit changes the voice a person hears that in, because nobody talks themselves out of a voice that old.

Now the order, because on this the whole thing turns.

Go to the most famous list in the world and read the sentence that comes before it. Before the first commandment, before anything at all is asked, God says: I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

Brought out. Past tense, done, before a word of instruction is spoken.

They were not climbing toward Him and being handed rungs. They were already out. He had already carried them, and He says so a chapter earlier in a line about being borne on eagles' wings and brought to Himself. The instruction came to people who were already His, standing in the open air, out of the brickyards, on the other side of the water.

You were brought out before you were ever taught one thing, and that is the order it happened in and the only order it has ever happened in. Exodus 20:2 puts the rescue in the sentence before the first command, and it is His Spirit, not my pointing at it, who makes that order land somewhere below your ribs.

Now let me be plain about what I am not doing here, because you may be braced for it.

I am not going to tell you which of them are for you today. That argument belongs to somebody else, it is not this site's business, and it is not what is actually hurting you. What is hurting you is the voice you have been reading them in. A person can settle every question about which lines apply and still be standing at the counter hearing a proctor. The voice in the text is a Father's, that is what is written, and His Spirit is unhurried about teaching an ear to hear it that way.

There is room in that book for commands and statutes and judgments, and there is a great deal in it that is worth a lifetime. What there is not room for is a scorecard, because a scorecard has no margins, and this book is nothing but margins. Somebody has written up the side of every page, in different pens, in different decades, and every note of it is somebody leaning over your shoulder.

You have a Father who writes in the margins, and He has never once handed you a page with red on it. His word says His instruction leads and keeps and talks with you, and the same Spirit who moved the men who wrote it is the one reading it to you now, in the right voice, maybe for the first time.