I Keep Checking It Is Still Dead

Grant reckons it is about every three weeks, which over eleven years is a number he has deliberately not worked out.

The old thing has been dead since 2015. Genuinely. Nobody who knows him would say otherwise, and two people who were there at the time have told him, unprompted, that they can hardly connect the man he was with the man he is.

He is not in danger of it. That is what makes this odd. He does not want it. There is no pull, no craving, no near miss, and the last time he was properly tested was seven years ago and he was not even shaken by it.

And every three weeks or so he goes and checks.

Not literally. He does not go anywhere. He runs it in his head: the sequence, the old triggers, what he would do if. He inspects himself, thoroughly, the way you would walk round a building at night trying doors, and every time he finds everything exactly as he left it.

And he is relieved for about a day and a half, and then the interval resets.

He has never told anybody, because saying it out loud produces one of two responses. Either people are alarmed, which is worse than useless, or they tell him it is a good thing to stay vigilant, which is what he tells himself, and which is why he has never examined it.

But there is an arithmetic that has started bothering him. Eleven years. Every three weeks. That is a great many hours spent walking round a building at night, and the building has never once been unlocked.

He is fifty-one and he is tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep.

You may know that walk.

Maybe yours is something you did, or something you were, or something in your family that you have been watching for in yourself since you were young. And you check. And you are relieved, briefly, and then the interval resets.

What I am not going to do

Let me be plain, because this is a place where a careless sentence could cost somebody a great deal.

I am not going to tell you the old thing was harmless. It was not. It cost you and it cost other people and you know exactly what it was capable of, and I am not going to make it small so that a paragraph works better.

I am not going to tell you to stop being sensible. If there are practical things you keep in place, keep them. Wisdom about a real danger is not the same thing as the vigilance I am talking about, and I am not asking you to take a single sensible arrangement down.

And I am not going to tell you that remembering is a failure. It is not. You are allowed to know your own history in full detail for the rest of your life.

What I want to look at is the checking, which is a specific action, and which is different from both wisdom and memory, and I think nobody has ever separated them out for you.

A death that does not have to be repeated

There is a sentence in Romans 6, in the chapter about being buried with Him, and it is about the permanence of what happened.

Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him.Romans 6:9

Dieth no more.

The point being made is about permanence. What happened, happened once, and does not need doing again, and cannot be undone by anything.

And Paul is not saying it as an abstract fact about Jesus. It is the middle of an argument about you: the reason the passage gives it is to establish what kind of thing your burial with Him was. Not provisional. Not a state requiring maintenance.

Which is where the checking sits, because the checking assumes maintenance.

And what happened to that old thing is not provisional. The written word attaches dieth no more to the whole argument about being buried with Him, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a man walking round a building at two in the morning.

And you are not the one holding it down. The word says likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ, and the Spirit is the one who makes reckoning an accounting rather than an effort.

What the vigilance costs

Now here is the part I actually want you to weigh, because you have started weighing it already and stopped.

Eleven years at that interval is a great deal of your life spent in a graveyard at night with a torch.

And it is not free. Every inspection puts the old thing back at the center of your attention, freshly, in detail. You have to bring it fully to mind in order to check whether it is still where you left it, which means the practice designed to keep it dead is also the practice that keeps it vivid.

That is not a moral failure. It is a mechanism, and you can see it working the moment somebody points at it.

And the guarding was never given to you. The word says the LORD is thy keeper, and it gives the keeping to Him rather than to the one being kept, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than requiring a patrol.

And nothing about you is under review. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who has been quietly gathering evidence about himself since 2015.