The Tally Of Clean Days

The tally was in pencil on the inside of the cupboard door where the mugs live, low down on the left, where a person reaching for a mug would not look.

Four strokes and a line through, four strokes and a line through. Marlene had been keeping it since the spring, and she had never told a living soul about it, not her husband, not the woman she walks with on Tuesdays, nobody.

One stroke for each day she got through without saying the thing.

The thing was a sentence. It had a particular shape and a particular temperature and she had heard it aimed at her, at the same kitchen height, from her own mother, and she had promised herself at about fourteen years old that it would stop with her. Then she had a son with a chin exactly like hers, and one evening it came out of her mouth in her mother's voice, word for word, with the same little pause before the end.

So she started counting.

Thirty-one was her best. Thirty-one strokes marching along under the shelf, and she remembers standing there one morning with the door open, holding a mug, looking at that little army of lines with something in her chest that was almost joy.

She said it again on day thirty-two.

And here is the part that matters more than the sentence. She did not just stop counting. She got the eraser end of the pencil and she rubbed every one of those thirty-one strokes off the wood, hard, until the paint came up in a small pale patch. Then she wrote one new stroke, alone, at the top left.

That patch is bigger than it used to be. She has worn it off and started over more times than she has counted the days.

Because the tally was never really about her temper. The tally was her standing. Thirty-one strokes meant she could pray without her ears going hot. Thirty-one meant she could sit in a room with other believers and belong there. And one lonely stroke meant she was back where she started, all the way back, as though the thirty-one had never happened and as though God kept the same column she kept.

She never once considered that He might not be counting.

If you have got a column of your own somewhere, in pencil or in a phone or just running in your head, come and stand at the sink with me. I want to show you a river.

Washing was the start of the sequence, not the end of it

Water shows up on the third page of the Bible, before there is anybody to be dirty.

God gathers the waters together into one place and He calls the gathering Seas, and it is the first thing in creation He gathers rather than divides. Water was a gathering before it was ever a washing. Hold on to that, because the whole shape of this is in it.

Then comes the law, and with it a great deal of washing. Leviticus 15 has a person washing their clothes and bathing and being unclean until the evening. Numbers 19 has water sprinkled on the third day and the seventh. It runs through the whole book: touch this, wash. Enter here, wash. Evening comes, wash again.

And every one of those washings was designed to be repeated. That is not a flaw somebody found later. Hebrews says it out loud and treats it as the obvious tell.

For then would they not have ceased to be offered? because that the worshippers once purged should have had no more conscience of sins.Hebrews 10:2

Read the logic. If a thing genuinely finished the job, you would stop doing it. The repetition itself is the evidence that the surface was being cleaned and not the person. Marlene's cupboard door is Leviticus. Wash, and clean until evening. Wash again tomorrow.

But a promise runs underneath the washings the whole time, and it does not sound like a washing at all.

Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you.Ezekiel 36:25-26

Notice who is holding the water. Every washing in Leviticus was something a person did. This one is something God does, and He does not stop at the water, He goes on to hand out a new heart in the very next breath. You have been given clean water you did not draw and a heart you did not manufacture, because Ezekiel 36:25 puts the verb in God's hands from beginning to end, and it is the Spirit of God who carries that out of a scroll and into a woman standing at a cupboard door.

Now the other thing water does in this book, which is the thing the tally cannot survive.

Israel came out of Egypt through water and came into the land through water, and the second one is not a washing at all. It is a crossing. The Jordan stands up in a heap, the whole nation walks over on dry ground, and Joshua puts twelve stones in the riverbed and twelve on the far bank so that the children would ask about it.

Then ye shall let your children know, saying, Israel came over this Jordan on dry land.Joshua 4:22

Came over. Once. Nobody crossed back on Thursday because they had a bad week in the camp. A washing restores a day; a crossing changes which side of the river you live on, and those are not two sizes of the same thing, they are two different categories. You are on the far bank, and the stones on the shore are the written record of it, and the Holy Spirit does not move people back over a river God dried up for them.

Then, at the same river, John is standing in the water, and one man comes down the bank who has nothing whatever to wash off. John tries to stop Him. He goes in anyway. And when He comes up out of that water the Father speaks over Him, which is a thing worth sitting with for a long while: the voice comes after the water, over a Son who was already loved before He went in.

Which brings us to the sentence Paul writes to Titus, and I want you to hear where he puts the emphasis.

Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost.Titus 3:5

Not by works of righteousness which we have done. That clause is aimed directly at a pencil tally. It does not say your works were insufficient. It says they were never the mechanism, and there is a world of difference between those two sentences. Your standing has never once been a running total, because Titus 3:5 hangs it on His mercy and on the renewing of the Holy Spirit, and a mercy that came in before your first stroke is not audited by your last one.