The Spreadsheet That Was A Prayer

There are nine of them in the folder and they are all named properly, which is the funny part and also the sad one.

Budget v4. Budget v4 FINAL. Budget v5 clean. Budget v5 clean with categories. She has always been good at naming files; her whole working life has been about being the person who can find the thing.

Nine versions this month. The underlying numbers have not changed since the twenty second of July.

That is the sentence to sit with. Nothing new has gone in. She has not received a single new figure. She has been rebuilding a representation of facts she already had, over and over, in the evenings, after everybody is in bed.

She is thirty five.

Here is what is actually going on, and she got to it herself in the small hours about ten days ago, which is why she is ready for this.

Her life will not come out in rows. There is a thing with her health that is unresolved and may stay unresolved for a while. There is a thing about her mother's house that involves three siblings and cannot be made fair. There is a decision about work that has two bad options and one that does not exist. None of it will sit still. None of it can be totaled. There is no column that any of it goes in.

The spreadsheet goes in columns.

So she opens it at ten at night and builds it again, and while she is building it, for about forty minutes, her life is a thing with rows in it, and she is calm.

And on the seventh of this month, at about half past midnight, she typed a heading and stopped and looked at the screen and thought, with complete clarity: this is a prayer.

Not a good one. Not one she would say out loud. But she recognized it. It was the same posture she takes into prayer: bring it, arrange it, present it neatly, hope that arranging it well enough will make it hold.

You know the folder. Yours may be a garden or a list or a cupboard. But you know what it is to do something over and over at an hour nobody sees, and to have worked out, eventually, what you were actually asking for.

Order came down over a thing that had none

Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, because if this lands on spreadsheets it will do nothing.

The pit is not the tool. A spreadsheet is a good tool and you are good with it and none of that is being taken away. The pit is that you have concluded, without ever putting it in a sentence, that a thing which cannot be arranged cannot be held, and therefore that the unarrangeable parts of your life are unheld. And a woman who believes that will rebuild something at half past midnight every night of her life, because it is the only place the holding is visible.

Here is the second sentence in the Bible.

The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.Genesis 1:2

Without form. There is no arrangement in it anywhere. Nothing in that deep could have been put in a column, and nothing in it was capable of arranging itself, and the text says so without embarrassment.

And over it, the Spirit of God, and the word for that is a brooding word. Deuteronomy 32:11 uses the same picture for an eagle spreading herself over her nest and her young. A bird over a nest, over something with no rows in it at all.

Here I teach one thing about the Hebrew and I draw the line in the same breath, because on this ground the two do not travel apart. The word for Spirit there is ruach, which also means breath and wind, and in Hebrew it is a feminine word, so the verb beside it takes a feminine form, exactly as it would beside the word for a hand or a city. Grammar is not sex. God is neither male nor female; Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and Scripture reaches for a father's traits and a mother's both to tell you who He is, and the bird over the nest is one of the motherly ones and He chose it Himself. It does not make the Spirit a woman and it does not make God a goddess. It makes the picture true.

Take that at half past midnight, and know it is not my consolation, it is the second sentence of the Bible. The unarrangeable part of your life is held, and it is held while it is still unarrangeable. Genesis 1:2 has the Spirit over a formless deep, and it is the Holy Spirit who is over the health thing and the house thing and the two bad options, tonight, in exactly the state they are in.

And the next verse is where the rows come from.

And God said, Let there be light.Genesis 1:3

That is the first sorting in the history of the world, and it came down by a word from above the water. The deep did not produce a category. It was not asked to. Nowhere is the water praised for a good structure or blamed for a poor one.

Your arranging was never what held any of this together. I am not putting down nine versions; they were an honest woman trying, at an hour nobody sees, and God is not unmoved by that. But the order came down, the whole time, and it did not need a schema.