What I Did While I Was Drinking

The rain is coming down hard enough that the roof of the car sounds like applause.

He is parked two streets away with the engine off and the wipers off, which means the windscreen has gone to water and streetlight, and he cannot see out, and nobody can see in. He is not lost. He knows exactly which house it is, four years of Sundays' worth of knowing. He is invited. There is a place set. Somebody has made the pudding he likes because somebody remembered.

And he has been sitting here for eleven minutes because the people in that house remember a night that he does not.

That is the whole trouble in one sentence, and it is a strange kind of trouble to carry. He has been told about it. Twice, in pieces, by two different people, and the pieces do not quite line up, and he cannot check them against anything of his own. There is a shape in his memory where an evening should be. What he has instead is other people's faces when it comes up, and the way one of them still measures her sentences around him.

He has apologized. That is the part that makes it worse rather than better. He apologized properly, without excuses, and it was received, and they were kind. He has not touched a drop in a long time. Nothing about tonight is in danger. And still, every single time he pulls up outside that house, he is nineteen minutes into a private trial where he is the accused, the prosecution, the witness who cannot testify, and the judge who will not adjourn.

You know the sound of that court, or you would not have opened this. Yours might not be a drink at all. It might be a phone, a temper, a season, a stretch of months you would give anything to have back. What makes it unbearable is not only what happened. It is that you are being asked to serve a sentence for something you cannot fully see, and that you have paid over and over and the account never seems to close.

I am not going to ask you what it was. Not once, anywhere in this message. You do not have to type it, tell it, or hand it to any person to be free of what it is doing to you tonight, and anyone who tells you the release is on the other side of a confession to a human being has added a fee that God did not charge.

But I want to say one thing about the record before we go further, because you have been reading it wrong. You have been assuming that the file is the problem. It is not. The problem is who has been holding it.

Two kinds of not remembering

There is a line in Isaiah where God says something twice in a row, in the same breath, and in Hebrew that doubling is how you shout without raising your voice.

I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.Isaiah 43:25

Start with the doubling, because it is deliberate. I, I am he. Not the accuser. Not the people in the house. Not you, at eleven minutes past seven, in a car, holding your own trial. He puts Himself twice into the sentence so that there is no room left in it for a second opinion about your case.

Then blots out. It is the picture of wiping a written surface until nothing is left to be read. Not a note in the margin saying paid. Not a file marked closed and kept on a shelf where somebody could pull it down again. Wiped, so that there is no longer a page for shame to read from.

Then the reason, and this is the part that undoes people. For my own sake. Not because you have paid enough. Not because your last four years have been good. Not because you finally cried the right way about it. The reason sits entirely on His side of the table, which means there is nothing on your side you can fail to supply.

And then the last clause, which was written for you specifically. I will not remember your sins.

Because here you are with a night you cannot remember, and it has been the source of your torment. And here is God saying, about that same night, that He does not remember it either. Two of you, and neither one can bring it up.

But hear the difference, because it is everything. Yours is a hole. His is a decision. You lost it and it still owns you. He has put it away deliberately, at cost, and what He has put away He does not go back for.

Now, the cost, because grace is never cheap and pretending it is makes it unbelievable. This is not God overlooking anything or deciding it did not matter. It mattered. It went somewhere. It went onto Jesus at the cross, in full, and He said it was finished, and finished is not a mood or a feeling. It is a legal condition. The blood covers the parts you remember and the parts you never will, which is a mercy specifically shaped for a person in your position.

Two things, plainly, and then we are going to the car.

The consequences of a life do not always undo themselves, and I would be lying to you if I said they did. Some things stay changed. What is settled is not the state of every relationship. What is settled is the verdict on you.

And if drink is still anywhere in this picture tonight, that part belongs in the hands of a doctor and people who know how to help a body through it. Do not make any change to it on your own and do not do it alone, because a body needs proper care through that and there is no holiness in going without help. That is a separate matter from what we are doing here, and what we are doing here is the shame.