The Books I Bought And Never Opened

There are seven of them and she can see them from where she sits.

The oldest one has been up there eleven years. The newest one came in March.

Every single one was bought in the same mood, which is the mood that arrives at about half nine at night when the question comes back and she decides, with real energy, that she is going to sort this out properly.

She orders it. It arrives. She is pleased when it arrives.

It goes on the shelf.

She has read the first four pages of two of them. One of them she has opened twice and got as far as the contents page, which she found more intimidating than she expected and has thought about since.

She is not stupid. She has a degree in something difficult and she reads constantly, and she read nine hundred pages of a novel about a lighthouse in about a fortnight last year.

So she knows the buying is not about wanting to know.

And here is what she has quietly concluded about herself, in eleven years, and never said to a living soul: that she does not open them because she does not actually want an answer. That she prefers the question unsettled, because a settled answer might go the wrong way, and a shelf is safer than a conclusion.

She thinks that makes her a coward. She has used that word about herself, silently, more than once.

The invitation is opened from the other side

Let me take the word off you first, because you have been holding it for eleven years and it is the wrong word.

You are not a coward. A coward would have thrown the question out. You have bought seven books over eleven years, which is seven separate acts of somebody refusing to let a thing go, spread across a decade, at half nine at night, on her own.

What you have not got is company. That is all that is missing. You have been trying to settle something enormous by yourself in a room, and the reason the contents page was intimidating is that a contents page is a very lonely object.

Now hear this and take it as already settled rather than as encouragement: this was never meant to be worked out alone with a book, and the invitation in that first chapter of Isaiah is opened from His side and it is an invitation to reason. That is not my sympathy talking, it is what stands written, and the same Holy Spirit who has brought that question back to you at half nine for eleven years is in the room now.

Read who is speaking, because that is the whole thing.

Come now, let us settle the matter, says the Lord. Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.Isaiah 1:18

Come now, let us settle the matter.

It is God who says it. He is the one who opens the conversation, and the older rendering of that line is come now, and let us reason together, which is even plainer about what is being offered.

He does not say: go away and resolve this and come back when you have. He says come, and let us, and together, which are three words that between them abolish the picture you have been living in for eleven years.

So take this now rather than after you have read one of them: you are not required to settle this by yourself in a room, because the written word has God opening the conversation and calling it reasoning together, and the Spirit of God has kept a question alive in you for eleven years rather than letting it quietly die.

And I will guard it, because there is a way to hear this that would leave you exactly where you are.

Nothing here says the books are useless or that reading is beside the point. Some of them are excellent. The one from March is genuinely good and you would find the third chapter of it a relief.

What is written simply refuses to leave you alone with it, and the Holy Spirit is described as the one who leads into truth, which is a verb about accompanying somebody, not a delivery of conclusions to a doorstep.