The Notes I Left in Library Books

She started in nineteen eighty six and she cannot remember why.

The first one was in a book about beekeeping and it said something about the third chapter, and she wrote it on a bit of paper the size of a bus ticket and put it inside the back cover and took the book back on the Tuesday and thought nothing more about it.

Then she did it again the next week, and by about the fourth she had the format: small, folded once, tucked in at the back, never in the front where it would fall out at the desk.

They are not clever. She wants that understood. She is not leaving little poems for strangers. Half of them say something about the book, and half of them say something like: I hope your week is a good one, and I hope somebody says something kind to you today.

She has done it for forty years. At two books a week, which is roughly her rate, and with time off for the years her husband was ill, she puts it at about three and a half thousand.

She is seventy four. She has never told a single member of her family. She has never had one word back. Not once, in forty years, has anybody left a note in a book for her, or written to the library, or stopped her in the street.

Tonight she is in the front room with four library books on the footstool waiting to go back and a pad on the arm of the chair, and she has not written one, and she has been sitting here about twenty minutes.

Because the sentence arrived this afternoon in line at the pharmacy, out of nowhere, in her own voice, and it was: what if all of them just went in the trash.

She has never asked that in forty years. She has now, and it will not put itself away.

You have your notes. It might not be paper. It might be prayers said for somebody who does not know, money sent quietly, a thing you have done every week for decades that nobody has ever mentioned. And the question has arrived, in your own voice, at a bad moment. There is a line in Isaiah that pronounces a blessing on exactly this, and it is worth reading with the pad still empty on the arm of the chair.

Blessed are you that sow beside all waters

I have to be careful here, because there is a version of this that sends her looking. Ask at the library. Put your name on one. Mention it to somebody and see. I am not going to say it, and not because it would do harm exactly, but because a woman with that question running will be looking for evidence about herself, and no librarian on earth is holding that.

Isaiah, at the end of a chapter about a coming quietness, says this: Blessed are ye that sow beside all waters, that send forth thither the feet of the ox and the ass (Isaiah 32:20).

Sow beside all waters. That is a picture of scattering seed everywhere there is any moisture at all, along every edge, without marking where, without fencing anything, without keeping a record of which patch got what. Farmers who work carefully do not sow like that. This is deliberately extravagant and deliberately untracked.

And the blessing is pronounced on the sowing. Not on the harvest, not on the report, not on the ones who see it come up. Blessed are you that sow.

You have been blessed in the doing of it and the blessing did not wait for a reply. That is not me stretching the verse; Isaiah 32:20 attaches the blessing to the scattering and stops there, and the Holy Spirit who inspired that line did not add a clause about hearing back.

And the second half is the detail nobody quotes: that send forth thither the feet of the ox and the donkey. It is an image of animals wandering loose over the sown ground, which is to say the sower is not even standing guard over it. The whole verse is a picture of a person who has let go of the field.

Blessed are ye that sow beside all waters, that send forth thither the feet of the ox and the ass.Isaiah 32:20

What arrived in the pharmacy

Now the thing that actually happened this afternoon, because it deserves respect rather than dismissal.

The question was not a lapse. What if all of them went in the trash is a fair question and she is seventy four and she has never asked it, and it arrived in a pharmacy on a Thursday because that is where these things arrive.

And here is what is true and what she is not seeing. Some of them did go in the trash. Almost certainly hundreds. That is what happens to small pieces of paper. The question is not whether some were thrown away; the question is what that says about the forty years, and the answer is: nothing at all, because the blessing was on the sowing.

You have never been graded on the ground the seed landed in. Mark 4:4 has the sower scattering and some falling by the wayside and getting eaten by birds, and Jesus tells it without one word of criticism of the sower; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) inspired a parable in which most of the seed does not come to anything and the sower is never blamed.

This is yours right now, with an empty pad on the arm of a chair: a blessing pronounced on the scattering itself. Isaiah 32:20 says blessed are you that sow, present tense and unconditional; the Spirit who inspired it put the blessing at the moment of the hand opening.

Three and a half thousand

Let me stay with her arithmetic, because it cuts both ways and she has only been running it one way.

Three and a half thousand notes. If ninety nine in a hundred went in the trash, and that is a very pessimistic estimate for something tucked at the back where it does not fall out at the desk, that leaves thirty five.

Thirty five people, over forty years, opened the back of a book and found a small folded paper from a stranger telling them they hoped somebody said something kind to them today.

She has never done that half of the arithmetic. Nobody in that state ever does.

You have been reaching people at a rate you have never once calculated. Zechariah 4:10 asks who has despised the day of small things, and the question has an edge on it and it is asked of whoever is doing the despising; the Holy Spirit who inspired that line put it in the form of a question so that the answer would have to be given by somebody.

Fruit is not output, and a bus ticket sized note is where the difference is easiest to see. Output would be a reply, a letter, a mention, a thing you could put in a drawer. Fruit is what happened in somebody at a kitchen table who was having a bad week and opened the back of a book, and John 15:5 puts the bearing on the branch and the seeing nowhere at all.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. While the kettle does what it does anyway, tell Him about one of the notes with nothing asked for. Not a request to know where it went. One note, one Tuesday, one bit of paper. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody counts that.