Rating the Day Out of Ten

The note on Ruth's phone is called days. There are no words in it anywhere. It is a column of numbers, one for every day since the first week of March, and beside each number there is nothing at all, because nothing needs explaining to the only person who will ever read it.

Six. Six. Four. Seven. Five. Six. Six.

She started it the Tuesday after the thing she had been working toward for four years finally landed. That day got an eight. She remembers looking at the eight and thinking, well, here we go, this is the floor now. Then Wednesday was a six, and Thursday was a six, and by the second week of April she understood that the eight had not been a floor at all. It had been a ceiling, and she had already been standing on it.

Nobody knows about the note. That is the part she could not explain even if somebody asked, and nobody asks, because from the outside the year has been a good one and she has said so out loud in three different kitchens. She is not lying when she says it. A six is not a bad day. A six is a day where the coffee was hot and the traffic moved and her back did not hurt and the list got done. If you had asked her at twenty-four what she wanted out of a life, she would have described a six in careful detail and called it everything.

What she cannot say to anybody is that she has never once written a ten.

Not on the day it landed. Not on the good Saturday in June when the whole family was at the lake and the light came in low across the water and everybody stayed later than they meant to. She gave that one a nine, and something in her chest went quiet and mean about the nine, as though the day had been graded and had come up short of a thing she could not name and had never seen.

Tonight she is at Ellen's kitchen table. It is late in the day, that hour when the sun comes in flat and orange under the top of the window and lays a gold edge along the rim of everything in the room. Ellen is telling a long story about her son and a truck that will not start. There is a dish towel over the back of a chair. There is a bowl of plums on the table with one of them cut open.

Ellen stops mid-sentence, gets up, and puts a plate down in front of her. Bread and butter and two of the plums, cut. "Eat something," she says. "You look tired."

Ruth picks up the bread. And somewhere behind her eyes, before she has even tasted it, the note is open and the evening has been given a seven.

The number was never the meal

I am not going to name the thing Ruth had been working toward, and that is deliberate. The moment a hungry person hears somebody else's particular, they hold it up against their own and start doing arithmetic, and that arithmetic has never once fed anybody. Yours is yours. It was a real thing to want, and wanting it did not make you a small person.

Here is what I want to say about the scoring, and I want to say it before anything else, because most people who keep a tally like Ruth's have been braced for a lecture about it for years.

The tally is not greed. It is not ingratitude and it is not a character problem. A person who quietly scores their days is a person trying to find out whether they are allowed to be all right yet. That is not the appetite of somebody who wants more than their share. That is the reflex of somebody who has never been told, by anyone with the authority to tell them, that the meal has already been served.

You are fed by God on a day you scored a five, and the number never had a vote in it. I am not saying that to be kind to you. Jeremiah 31:14 has the Lord saying He will satiate the soul with fatness and His people shall be satisfied with His goodness, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a written line like that and sets it down in a kitchen at seven in the evening, in front of somebody holding a piece of bread and grading it.

And I will satiate the soul of the priests with fatness, and my people shall be satisfied with my goodness, saith the LORD.Jeremiah 31:14

Look at what He satiates. Not the circumstances. The soul. The thing in you doing the counting is the very thing He said He would fill, which means the counting is not the disqualification. It is the address.

You have a God who feeds the appetite instead of correcting it, and that has been true through every month of the column. The written word does not say He satisfies the people who stopped wanting. It says He satisfies His people with His goodness, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that specific instead of general, who brings it down out of a chapter about a nation and puts it against one person's actual Tuesday.

What the tally is really asking

A score is a question wearing a number.

When Ruth writes a six she is not reporting the weather. She is asking, is this it, is this the shape of it now, am I permitted to stop looking over the fence. And the reason she has never written a ten is not that no day deserved one. It is that a ten would mean the looking could stop, and nothing inside her has ever been given permission to stop.

So the day at the lake got a nine. Not because it was a nine. Because a ten would have been an ending, and she has no experience of endings that hold.

That is the real ache, and it is not answered by lowering the standard. It is answered by somebody with more authority than the tally saying the looking is over because the table is set. That is what God actually does. He does not argue you down to a smaller number. He puts food in front of you while the number is still running.

You are not a person who cannot be pleased, and nothing in you needs curing before you eat. Psalm 107:9 says He satisfies the longing soul and fills the hungry soul with goodness, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the word longing out of that line and lays it gently over your own name instead of over somebody more spiritual than you.

And here is the honest part, because you would smell it on me if I skipped it. The wanting may come back. It may be back before the plate is cleared. Nothing I can say makes it never return, and I would not trust anybody who promised you it would not. You were never given a table on the condition that the hunger stays away from it. Scripture never once makes the meal contingent on the appetite behaving, and the Spirit of God has been feeding restless people at that table for a very long time without a word of complaint about their restlessness.