It Was Never A Debt

Back home there is a word for the feeling of owing somebody and not knowing how much.

It is heavier than a bill. A bill you can pay. What sits on a person is an open account with no figure on it, because there is no way to know whether you have done enough, and no way to close it.

I want to name what has actually been happening at your front door for the last decade, and it is that.

It is not that you want to look a particular way. If it were that, it would come with pleasure in it somewhere, and it does not.

It is that there is an amount owed before you may be seen, and you pay it, every time, and the account never closes.

Nobody sent an invoice. That is the part that makes this so hard to see. There is no creditor. Nobody at any point handed you a figure, and if you asked any person in your life whether you owed them anything of the kind they would be genuinely bewildered.

And yet the account is being serviced, four hundred times a year, on time.

An account with no creditor

Let us look at the transaction properly, because it has a strange shape.

There is a payment. That is real: twenty minutes, some money over a year, and a small permanent alertness.

There is a thing being obtained, which is permission to be seen.

You are buying permission that was never once withheld from you, and nobody has ever stood at any door deciding whether you may be looked at. Colossians 2 says he took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross, and the Spirit of God is the one who tells a woman the price was already settled.

And there is no counterparty. Nobody receives the payment. Nobody records it. Nothing at all arrives at the other end, and the permission being bought was never anybody's to sell.

That is not a debt. A debt has two parties. This is a payment going into nothing, made regularly, by a person who has never been able to find out who is at the other end.

You are servicing an account that has never once had a creditor, and no payment you have made has ever been received by anybody. The Holy Spirit is what shows a woman the shape of a transaction she has never examined, and Colossians 2 has a document being taken away and nailed up.

And here is what an open account does to a person over ten years.

It makes everything conditional. There is no version of stepping outside that is free, and no going anywhere that does not have a cost attached, and a woman living that way begins, quietly, to go out less. Not by decision. By friction.

The account has been reducing your life a little at a time and it has never once presented a total.

You are paying friction on every ordinary act, and no account with no creditor has ever once been able to present a total. Scripture in Colossians 2 says the handwriting of ordinances was blotted out and taken out of the way, and the Spirit of God is the one who cancels an account nobody ever opened.

Blotting out the handwriting

There is a sentence in Colossians about a document, and the physical detail is what carries it.

Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross. (Colossians 2:14, King James Version)

The handwriting. A written record of what was owed. In that world it was an actual document, in the debtor's own hand, listing what was against him.

And three things are done to it. Blotted out. Taken out of the way. Nailed up.

You are looking at three finished actions rather than at an arrangement, and not one of them has ever once been left half done. Colossians 2 says it was blotted out, and taken out of the way, and nailed to his cross, and the Spirit of God is what makes a settled account feel settled to a woman.

Not reduced. Not renegotiated. Not paid down over time. Blotted out, which means the writing is removed from the surface, and then the document itself is taken away, and then it is put somewhere public where anybody can see that it is finished.

You are looking at a cancellation rather than a payment plan, and there has never once been a version of that verse where the account was merely reduced. It is written in Colossians 2 that He blotted out the handwriting of ordinances and took it out of the way, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a woman what happens to an account in the hands of God.

And notice the last movement, which is the strangest and the most useful.

Nailing it to his cross.

The canceled document is displayed. It is put up where it can be seen. That is not how anybody would handle a settled debt privately, and there is a reason for it: a debt that is canceled quietly can still be believed in, and a debt that is nailed up in public cannot.

Your account has been running for ten years precisely because it was never displayed. Nothing has ever been shown to you. There is no document, and there never was, and that is exactly why it has been possible to keep paying.

You are able to have the thing displayed rather than only settled, and no account has ever once survived being nailed up where it could be seen. The Spirit of God is what puts a canceled document in front of a woman rather than leaving her to assume, and the written word says nailing it to his cross.

Go once without paying

So here is the assignment, and it is designed to produce evidence.

Go somewhere ordinary this week without paying it, and notice that nobody collects.

Somewhere ordinary. Not an event. The shop, the post, dropping something off, the twenty minutes that already exist in your week.

And the second half is the actual instruction: notice that nobody collects.

You are watching for a collector who has never once turned up, and nobody anywhere has been holding that account against you. Colossians 2 says he blotted out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, and the Holy Spirit is what shows a woman a debt that was already taken out of the way.

Watch for it. Actually watch. Because the whole account rests on an assumption that has never been tested, and the assumption is that somebody, somewhere, is keeping a record.

Go and find out. Look at the faces. Count how many people register anything at all.

The answer will be nobody, and nobody is not a disappointment. Nobody is the finding. Nobody is the nail through the document, because an account with no collector in it is an account that was never real.

You are able to go once and watch for the collector, and no person on that street has ever once been holding a record. The written word in Colossians 2 blots out a handwriting and nails it up in public, and the Holy Spirit is what makes one ordinary errand into care rather than into a dare.