It Counted While You Felt Nothing

She was nineteen, and the tank was one of those portable ones that a man in the church had built out of scaffold poles and pond liner, and the water was so cold it took the top of her breath away.

She remembers three things about the morning, and none of them are the ones she is supposed to remember.

She remembers that the microphone was doing that thin whine it always did, and somebody's dad was walking towards the desk to fix it. She remembers wondering whether her mother had got the camera on, because her mother had a talent for pressing record at the end of things. And she remembers the exact half second before she went under, when the thought that arrived in her head, uninvited, with the whole church watching, was: my hair is going to look ridiculous.

Then the water. Then the noise of the water, which is not really a noise. Then two hands lifting her back up, and everybody clapping, and a towel that smelled of somebody else's washing powder, and a woman she barely knew crying at her in the front row.

And nothing.

No warmth. No lightning. No lifted weight. She stood there dripping in a cold hall in a borrowed towel and she was exactly the same person she had been ninety seconds earlier, and she had the presence of mind, even then, to be appalled about it.

She has never told anybody that. Eleven years. She has sat in rooms where people describe going under and coming up new, and she has nodded along and thought about her hair.

And here is where it turns.

Last spring she found the video. Her mother, it turns out, had got the camera on. She watched it alone, in the kitchen, at one in the morning, expecting to see her own face come up out of the water carrying nothing, because that is what she remembered.

That is exactly what she saw. Her own face, blank as a plate.

But her face was not the only thing in the frame. And what she noticed, at one in the morning, eleven years too late, was that while she was busy checking herself for a feeling, the entire rest of the room had been getting on with something.

Nobody feels their own funeral

I want to say something to you plainly, and I am not going to dress it up.

You did not fail that day.

Whatever you have quietly suspected about yourself since, whatever you have concluded in the small hours about why other people came up shining and you came up cold, put it down. It is not true and it never was, and I am not going to spend one sentence being gentle with an idea that has been unkind to you for a decade.

Now look at what the water was actually doing, because Paul says it in one sentence and the sentence has no feelings in it anywhere.

We were buried with Him through baptism into death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.Romans 6:4

Read it again and hunt for the part where you are required to produce something. It is not there.

Buried with Him. That is a funeral, and it is His funeral, and you were put into it. Nobody feels their own funeral. That is not a defect in the mourner; it is the nature of the thing. The whole point of a burial is that it is done for you, by other people, while you are past helping.

Raised by the glory of the Father. Whose glory? Not yours. Not the temperature of your nineteen year old heart in a scaffold pole tank on a cold morning. His.

And you were buried with Him and raised with Him and both of those were done to you. That is not my softening: the written word puts both verbs in the passive with the Father named as the one acting, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman awake at one in the morning.

And then the last clause, which is the one I want in your hands: so that we too might walk. Walk. A verb with feet in it. Not glow. Not tingle. Not feel. The verse ends with an ordinary Tuesday, and an ordinary Tuesday is exactly what you have had eleven years of.

Here is the thing about signatures. A signature is not made valid by how the hand felt while it moved. A person can sign the most important document of their life while thinking about parking. The document does not care. The document is not resting on the inner life of the signer, it is resting on the authority of the one who drew it up.

That is what was going on around you while you were checking yourself. God was doing something in His own name, on His own authority, and it did not require your feelings as a co-signer. It never asked you for them. It has never once been short of them.

And you are not required to underwrite what He did Himself. The word says by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, and the Spirit is the one who makes not of yourselves stretch to cover the feelings as well.

And you are not standing outside a thing everybody else got in on. The word gives one baptism with no questionnaire attached and no register of who felt it, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than grading a cold morning.

So no, you are not missing a piece. You are not standing outside something everybody else got in on. And I am not going to hand you a technique for producing the warmth you did not get, because the warmth was never the thing, and chasing it is how a good day gets turned into a debt.

If you want to talk about that morning with somebody, talk about it. Find a person you trust in the place where you actually worship, and say it out loud to them, and let them look at you while you say it. That is what people are for. That is the whole of my advice on the subject and I am stopping there on purpose.