Twice Is Not More Locked

Dougie checks the boiler room door.

This is at eleven at night, in a primary school with the heating ticking and the smell of floor polish and somebody's forgotten packed lunch going quietly bad in a cloakroom. He tries the handle. It does not move. He writes the time on the sheet on his clipboard, and he walks on down the corridor toward the hall.

Then he stops.

He knows he checked it. He can see himself checking it. He can feel the handle in his hand, and that is precisely the problem, because he can also feel the handle in his hand from Tuesday, and from the Tuesday before that, and the memories have started to blur into one long identical handle.

So he walks back. Forty meters. Tries it again. Locked.

He writes nothing this time, because writing it twice would look mad on the sheet.

Marek finds him there on the third go, at half past midnight, standing with his hand on a door that has not opened by itself since 1974.

Marek does not laugh at him. That is the thing about Marek. He puts his flask down on the radiator, and he stands next to him for a minute, and then he says the sentence that Dougie will still be thinking about eleven years later.

"Dougie. Twice is not more locked than once."

And Dougie says, "I know."

And Marek says, "I know you know. That is the bit that is hurting you."

They stand there. Somewhere in the building a fridge motor kicks in. And Marek picks his flask back up and says, "Come and have this while it is hot. The door is fine. It has been fine since half nine. It is you that is not fine, pal, and it is not the door that is going to sort that."

Now. It is one in the morning and you are not in a school corridor. You are lying on your back with the room gray and the clock face turned away from you on purpose, and you have just remembered that you are not certain whether you said it before you went under.

You think you did. You had it in your mind. But you also had a podcast on and you cannot swear that you got the words out, and if you did not get the words out then technically you fell asleep with it unconfessed, and something in you has decided that technically matters enormously.

So you start again. Quietly, so as not to wake anybody. And it takes a while, because now you are also confessing the fact that you cannot remember.

Let me stand next to you for a minute the way Marek stood next to Dougie. I am not going to tell you the door is fine and walk off. I want to show you who locked it.

You are not the one holding the bolt

Paul opens the eighth chapter of Romans with a sentence he has spent seven chapters earning the right to say, and when he finally says it he says it flat, with no hedging anywhere in it.

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.Romans 8:1

Three words in that sentence are doing the work, and the one everybody skips is the smallest.

Now. Not eventually. Not on review. Not pending the outcome of tonight's checking. Now, which is one in the morning, which is a gray room, which is the exact moment you are lying there running the tape back to see whether the words came out.

And no. Not less. Not a manageable amount. None, which is a quantity, and it is the quantity currently standing against you.

So hear it said over you, because you have been saying the opposite over yourself since half past twelve. You are in Christ Jesus, and there is therefore now no condemnation on you at all. I am not being kind to you here. I am reading you a line God had written down long before either of us arrived, and it is His Spirit, not my sentence construction, who takes a written line and makes it land somewhere under the ribs.

Here is what has happened to your conscience, and it is worth seeing plainly, because you have been treating it as a spiritual problem when part of it is simply a tired mind doing what tired minds do.

The checking does not produce certainty. It consumes it.

Every time Dougie went back to that handle, he taught himself that the handle was worth going back to. Every check made the next check more necessary, not less, because he was training a part of himself to treat its own memory as unreliable evidence. By the third trip he was not checking a door. He was checking himself, and he was never going to pass, because nobody passes an examination whose standard is absolute certainty about your own interior.

And that is where your one in the morning lives too. You are not actually unsure whether God forgives. Ask you at noon and you will preach it to somebody else without blinking. You are unsure whether you performed the transaction correctly, and there is no amount of performing that settles a question about performance.

So God took the question off you.

That is what the cross did. It did not make you better at confessing. It moved the whole matter out of your competence and into His finished work, so that the thing holding the bolt is not the quality of your memory at midnight. You have been kept all night by Someone who does not sleep, and your uncertainty about the wording did not loosen a single thing. That is written, plainly, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it to you tonight rather than leaving it as a fact on a page.

You are covered right now, while you are still unsure whether you are. Read that twice if you need to. Your assurance does not run on your recall. It runs on His faithfulness, and Scripture says He remains faithful even when we are faithless, because He cannot deny Himself. That is not a loophole. That is the ground.

I know somebody reading this has already thought: but what if the not-remembering is itself a sign I do not really care.

No. Nobody who did not care would be awake at one in the morning about it. The very anxiety you are treating as evidence against you is evidence of a heart that is alive and tender and pointed the right way, and if you would grant that to a friend you should grant it to yourself.