The Date In The Front Cover

Two men on a ridge at first light, at the place where one man's country stops and the other man's country starts, and neither of them has trusted the other for twenty years.

They are not friends. That has to be said plainly or the rest of it goes soft. There has been sharp dealing on both sides, wages moved about, daughters and flocks and a night flit with the herds. They have chased each other across three days of hill country to arrive at this morning, and what they have finally agreed on is that they are going to stop.

So they do a strange thing. The older man tells his people to gather stones, and they walk the slope picking up whatever the winter has turned out of the ground, and they carry them up and drop them, and the heap grows until it is higher than a man. Then somebody spreads a cloth on the flat top of it and they eat a meal there, on the stones, in the wind, with the sun coming up behind them.

And then they name it.

Not for the quarrel. Not for the daughters, and not for either family. They name it for the only thing it does. It watches. It stands there on that ridge and it sees, and from this morning on, when either man looks north or south and remembers what he agreed, the heap is the thing that says it happened.

Nobody carves a record of feelings into it. Nobody asks either man how moved he was. They pile up stones, they eat on them, they name the heap for its one job, and they walk away in opposite directions, and the heap stays.

Now go and get your Bible off the shelf and open the front cover.

There is a date in there. Blue biro, most of it, in handwriting that is yours and does not look like your handwriting, because you were seventeen, or twenty two, or forty and having a bad year. There might be a place name. There might be a verse number.

And if somebody sat you down tonight and asked you what actually happened that day, you would not be able to tell them. You remember the room. You remember the song, roughly. You remember walking out into a car park and the air being cold, and you remember deciding that something had shifted.

What you cannot do is produce the feeling. You have gone looking for it more than once, quietly, in the middle of a hard week, and it has never come back, and somewhere in you a question has been sitting patiently for years: did anything actually happen, or did I write a date in a book?

Two men on a ridge did not write down what they felt. They raised something that stands whether or not anybody feels anything.

A sign is raised to be looked at, not to be felt

Look again at what that heap was actually for, because it is not what most of us assume.

It was not a souvenir. It was not there to help either man relive a good morning. It was raised as a witness, which is a job description: a witness stands there and says what happened, out loud, to anyone who looks, long after everybody involved has gone home and gone cold on the whole business.

And Laban said, This heap is a witness between me and thee this day.Genesis 31:48

Notice who the heap was for. It was between them. It stood in the space where two parties had come to terms, and the reason it worked is that neither man had to carry it. Stones do not depend on your memory of the day you stacked them.

So take this off the ridge and put it where you sit tonight, because it is already yours and I am only telling you what is there. You are inside something whose sign was never your feeling and never your recall. Scripture says the seal put on a believer is the Holy Spirit of promise, given and not achieved, and the Spirit Himself is the standing witness in you rather than the weather that moves across you.

The bow was hung where God looks

There is a second sign in that old book that settles this more thoroughly than anything I could argue.

After the flood, God hangs a bow in the cloud and calls it the sign of the covenant. Then He says something that people read past every time. He says: when the bow is in the cloud, I will look upon it, and I will remember.

Sit with the direction of that. The sign is not hung where a man can check on his own condition. It is hung where God looks, and the remembering He speaks of is His remembering. The sign points from the earth up toward the One who swore, and its whole reliability is that He is the One reading it.

That is why you have been searching in the wrong place, and it is not your fault that you were. You have been going back to a car park in a cold night looking for evidence, and the evidence was never stored in you. It is written into the finished work of Christ and it is countersigned by the Holy Spirit who was given to you, and neither of those two things dims because a Tuesday in your fortieth year felt like nothing at all.

There are terms in this, and I will not tidy them away. God's part is the sign, raised and standing and never taken down. Your part is to look at the right thing: to stop interrogating your own memory and start reading the witness He actually raised.