I Have Read That Report Four Times

It is on the side, or in the drawer, or folded in the cover of something.

And you have been back to it. More than once. You went back for information the first time, and the second time you went back for something else, and by the fourth time you were not really reading it at all. You were interrogating it.

Because there is a sentence in there. One. And it is the only part of the document you can now recall, and you have been holding it up to the light trying to work out what they actually meant by it.

Here is what I want to suggest, and it is going to sound almost too simple. There may be nothing behind it. It may be a sentence a tired adult wrote in the fortieth of these they had to write that week, and it may contain exactly and only what it says.

You have been asking a short document to carry a weight it was never built to carry.

Keep thy heart with all diligence

There is an instruction in Proverbs that sounds general and is in fact extremely practical.

Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life. (Proverbs 4:23, King James Version)

Keep is a guarding word. It is what a person does with a gate, or a flock, or a house. It implies traffic: things trying to get in, and somebody deciding what is admitted.

And the reason given is mechanical. Out of it are the issues of life. What is in there comes out, into everything.

So this is not an instruction about feelings. It is an instruction about admissions policy.

You have been given a gate rather than a filter, and scripture has never once expected a person to process everything that arrives at them. Proverbs 4:23 makes the keeping active and deliberate, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a parent permission to decide what is admitted this week.

And notice what all diligence implies. It implies effort, and it implies that things will attempt entry, and it implies that not everything gets in.

Which means a sentence arriving in a report is not automatically admitted. It has to be let in, and it has been let in four times now, and each time it has been given a longer interview.

You are able to stop admitting the same sentence, and re reading has never once been the same act as understanding. The written word makes the guarding deliberate, and the Spirit of God is the one who shows a person what they have been letting through the gate.

What a report can hold

Let me be exact about the document itself, because I think accuracy is a kindness here.

A written report is a short, formal, careful summary of a large amount of experience. It is written under time pressure, in a house style, about many children, by somebody who has to say something true about each of them without being unkind to any of them.

That is a genuinely difficult piece of writing, and most of them do it well. And the form has a ceiling.

It cannot say how your child was on the Thursday after the funeral. It cannot say what the teacher actually thinks about their sense of humor. It cannot say I am slightly worried but not worried enough to ring you.

You have been reading for content that has never once been able to appear in that form. Proverbs 4:23 assigns the guarding to the person rather than to the document, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a parent stop searching a page that has already given everything it has.

And here is the second thing, and it is the one that matters most.

The fourth reading is not producing information. It is producing feeling, and the feeling then becomes the memory of the report, so that within a month what you remember is not the words at all. It is how you felt at eleven at night reading them for the fourth time.

You are able to keep a document from becoming a mood, and a mood has never once been able to be answered by rereading the thing that made it. The written word names the heart as the place where the issues of life come from, and the Spirit of God is the one who guards a gate a parent has been leaving open.

You were never required to extract certainty from a page, and no report anywhere has ever once been written to supply it. Proverbs 4:23 puts the keeping in the reader's hands rather than in the writer's, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a relief instead of a duty.

Put it away, and write the one sentence

So here is the thing to do, and it takes two minutes and a drawer.

Tonight, put the report away. In a drawer, in a folder, somewhere with a door on it. Not on the side.

Then, on a separate piece of paper, write down the one sentence you keep going back to. The actual sentence, word for word.

Look at it on its own, away from the rest.

You are allowed to handle one sentence instead of a whole document, and nobody has ever once been required to answer a page all at once. Proverbs 4:23 names the keeping as a diligent and selective act, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when somebody copies out eleven words and stops.

Most people find that the sentence is shorter than they remembered and more ordinary than they remembered, and that a good deal of what they had been reacting to was not in it.

You have been carrying a sentence plus everything you added to it, and the original has never once been as long as the version in your chest. Proverbs 4:23 puts the guarding in the reader's own hands, and the Spirit of God is the one who shows a person where the page ends and their own additions begin.

And then, if there is a real question in it, write the question you would ask, and put that piece of paper somewhere you will find it before the next meeting.

You are able to save a question for a person instead of spending it on a page, and a page has never once been able to answer one. Proverbs 4:23 assigns the guarding to the one whose heart it is, and the Spirit of God is the one who holds a question steady for four weeks until somebody can be asked it.

That is the whole thing. The document goes away. The one sentence comes out. The question, if there is one, gets saved for a person rather than spent on a page.

Proverbs 4:23 puts the guarding of the heart in the hands of the person whose heart it is, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in a kitchen where somebody closes a drawer.

You are permitted to put a document out of sight, and putting something away has never once been the same as ignoring it. The written word makes the keeping active and diligent, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present when a drawer shuts.

You have one sentence on a piece of paper instead of a page in your chest, and the two have never once weighed the same. Proverbs 4:23 names the heart as the source of the issues of life, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the smaller object the true size of the thing.