The Face In The Photograph

There is one photograph and Simone has looked at it more times than she would ever admit.

It was taken from the side, badly, by her uncle, who was not a photographer. She is coming up. Her hair is flat to her head and there is water coming off her chin and her eyes are closed and her mouth is doing something you cannot quite classify.

That mouth is the whole problem.

Is that joy? It might be. It might also be a woman getting water out of her nose. It might be nothing at all, the way a face is nothing at all in the tenth of a second a shutter catches.

She has zoomed in on it. She has had it on her phone for years. She has looked at it in bed and in the car and once, embarrassingly, in a meeting.

And what she is doing every single time, though she has never put it in words, is trying to read her own heart off her own face from twenty-two years ago.

Because she has no memory of what she felt. That is the honest position. She remembers the cold, and the man's hand on her back, and somebody's baby crying at the wrong moment. Of the interior of it, of what was actually going on in her, she has nothing. A blank where the important part should be.

So she goes to the photograph, which is the only witness she has.

And the photograph will not say.

You might have your own witness that will not talk.

A picture, a video somebody sent you, a card with the date on. Or nothing at all, which is its own version. And you have been going back to it looking for a reading you were never going to get from it.

The verse that stops the interrogation

There is a sentence in John's first letter that I want to put in your hand, and it arrives in the middle of him talking about a heart that will not settle.

For if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.1 John 3:20

Read the structure of it. He does not say if our heart condemns us, examine the evidence more carefully. He does not send you back to look again.

He says God is greater than your heart, and He knows.

And note the exact size of that claim. It is not that your heart is lying. John is more careful than that. It is that your heart, whatever it is saying, is smaller than He is, and has less information than He has, and is therefore not the final court on you.

And your own reading of yourself was never the last word. The written word says God is greater than our heart and knoweth all things, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman zooming in on a photograph in a meeting.

And you are not required to produce evidence about your own interior. The word puts the knowing with Him rather than with your recall, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit, which is a thing He does rather than something you verify.

What a photograph can and cannot hold

Let me be practical for a moment, because I think this helps.

A photograph is a tenth of a second. Less. It is a physical record of where light was.

It has no access whatever to what a person was thinking. This is true of every photograph of every human being who has ever lived. The most joyful moment of your life, caught at the wrong instant, looks like a woman with water in her nose, and there is no version of the technology that would have done better.

So the instrument you have been using does not measure the thing you have been asking it about. It is not a faulty instrument. It is a perfectly good instrument for a completely different question.

Which means twenty-two years of examination has produced no result, not because the answer is bad, but because the question cannot be asked of a photograph.

And the blank where the feeling should be is not a verdict. The word never once makes what happened contingent on what the person in the water was able to recall afterwards, and the Spirit is the one who makes a missing memory bearable rather than damning.

The word that is doing the work

Now, notice the last three words of the verse, because I think they are the ones for you.

And knoweth all things.

Not: and will judge fairly. Not: and is kind about it. Knows. All of it. Including the tenth of a second the shutter caught and the ten minutes on either side of it that nobody photographed, and what a twenty-two year old woman was actually doing in her own chest while her hair went flat.

He was there. He was not looking at her face.

And He was in that water and He was reading something better than a photograph. The word says the Lord looketh on the heart, and He does it directly rather than from the side with a borrowed camera, and the Spirit is the one who makes that comfort rather than exposure.

And there is no condemnation waiting at the end of the examination. The word says there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that, which no amount of zooming in has ever produced.