Because My Friends Were Going

Sasha was fourteen and there were four of them and it was, if she is honest, mostly about the four of them.

That is the part she has never dressed up, even privately. There had been a week away in the summer. Something had happened there, or something had happened to everybody else and she had been near it, and by the Sunday of the week they were all putting their names down and it did not occur to her not to.

She meant it at the time. She would want that said. She was not cynical, she was fourteen, and at fourteen meaning something and wanting to be with your friends are not two separate departments.

But she is thirty-six now, and somewhere in her twenties she developed the ability to look back at fourteen with adult eyes, and adult eyes are merciless.

And what adult eyes see is a girl in a queue with her friends.

So she has a private theory about herself, which is that the whole thing was social, and that she has been running on the momentum of a group decision made in 2004 by four girls who are now variously in Manchester, married, out of touch and dead.

She has never said it. It would sound cynical and she is not cynical. She loves God, she thinks, and she notices the she thinks every time it turns up in her own sentence.

You might have a fourteen of your own.

Maybe you went forward because the row went forward. Maybe you signed something because it was being passed along. Maybe you said a prayer because a person you liked was looking at you kindly and there was no world in which you were going to say no.

And you have wondered since whether a thing that started like that could possibly be yours.

What the whole thing is resting on

Here is the question underneath, stated properly, because I think you have been asking it in a fuzzy form for years.

Was the reason good enough?

That is the question. And the reason it never resolves is that it has an assumption in it: that the thing holds because the motive was of sufficient quality.

Which sounds obviously right, until you look at where the letters put the holding.

If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself.2 Timothy 2:13

Read that slowly, because it is one of the most startling sentences in the New Testament.

Paul does not write if we believe not, He is released from the arrangement. He writes that His faithfulness does not run on ours, and then he gives the reason, and the reason is about His nature rather than our performance. He cannot deny Himself. To stop being faithful He would have to stop being who He is.

And what holds you was never the quality of your fourteen year old reasoning. The written word roots His faithfulness in His own nature rather than in the state of ours, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman looking back at 2004 with adult eyes.

And you are not being assessed on your motive from twenty-two years ago. The word says he abideth faithful and gives no clause about what condition the believing was in, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a relief rather than a technicality.

Adult eyes are not more accurate

Now here is something I want to hand you, and it is not a consolation prize, it is a genuine observation about how memory works.

You have been treating your thirty-six year old assessment of fourteen as the accurate one.

It is not more accurate. It is differently situated.

Thirty-six can see the group dynamics that fourteen could not see. Fine. But thirty-six also cannot feel a single thing that fourteen felt, and it is doing its analysis on a summary rather than the event. It has the social map and not the interior.

And the interior is the bit you keep saying was not there. On the basis of a document written by somebody who was not in the room.

And you were actually present at fourteen and your adult reconstruction was not. The word says the Lord looketh on the heart, which puts the reading of a fourteen year old in hands better than either of yours, and the Spirit is the one who lets a person stop prosecuting her own adolescence on incomplete evidence.

What was actually going on in that queue

Let me put one more thing beside it.

Four girls put their names down. You went with them. That is the social account and it is true.

Here is another account that is also true. A fourteen year old girl, who did not have to, in front of a room, in water, said that she belonged to Jesus.

Both of those descriptions fit the same afternoon. You have kept only one of them, and it is the less generous one, and you have kept it for twenty-two years.

And what you said at fourteen was said in front of Him and He heard it. The word says whosoever shall confess me before men, him will I confess before my Father, and there is no minimum age and no motive audit attached, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit about a room you cannot properly recall.

And now, gently. If any of this leaves you actually wanting to talk about the water rather than just think about it, then talk to somebody. A real person, somewhere you are actually known, out loud. Find someone. That is the whole of the advice and I am stopping there deliberately, because you are on the other side of a screen and I do not know your life.