The One You Cannot Remember

There is a photograph in a shoebox at Rhys's mother's house, and he has looked at it perhaps six times in forty-three years.

He is a few weeks old in it. Somebody's hand is under his head. There is water and there are people and everybody is dressed the way people dressed then, and his mother is standing slightly to the left looking not at the camera but at him.

That is the entire record. There is no memory attached to it because there could not be. He was too small. He has been told about it his whole life the way you are told about a holiday you went on at two: it is a fact you own without having been there for it.

And that was completely fine, for forty-one of the forty-three years.

Then a man he liked and respected said a sentence to him at a table after a meal, kindly, without any intent to wound. He said something about how a thing you cannot remember cannot really have happened to you, not in the way that matters, and Rhys nodded because he was holding a cup and there was no version of that moment in which he was going to say anything else.

He has thought about it most weeks since.

Not constantly. It does not run his life. But it comes when he is doing something with his hands, and it always arrives in the same shape, and the shape is a question about whether the whole of his standing rests on a morning he was not conscious for.

You may know this exact thing.

Maybe yours is a photograph too. Maybe it is a certificate in a drawer with a date on it in somebody else's handwriting, and a room you have never seen, and a name of a man who did it who died before you could ask him anything.

And somebody, once, said a sentence about it that got in.

I am not going to put you on a side

Let me say the first thing very plainly, because I suspect it is the thing you have been braced for since the title.

This article is not going to enter that argument.

I am not going to tell you that what happened to you as an infant settles everything, and I am not going to tell you it settles nothing. Sincere people who love the same Jesus have divided over that for centuries, on both sides, with real reasons, and both sides have people in them I would trust with my life.

You did not come here to be enrolled. You came here carrying a sentence somebody said at a table.

So there is no exam in this piece, and no way to fail it, and if you are waiting for the paragraph where I tell you which camp you should be in, it is not coming.

And you cannot fail a category on this page. The written word hands out one baptism and no questionnaire, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that a settling in a man who has been quietly graded since a meal two years ago.

What I will do is take apart the actual mechanism of the sentence that got in, because there is something underneath it that is not true, and it is doing you damage regardless of which side you eventually land on.

Whose memory was ever holding it up

The sentence assumed something. It assumed that the thing which makes a day count is your recollection of it.

Now look where the Scripture puts the remembering.

Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands.Isaiah 49:15-16

Read the direction of that. It is not a verse about how well you hold on to Him.

It is a verse about a memory that does not fail, and He puts it in the strongest human terms available and then says His is stronger than that, and then He goes further and says the record is cut into His own hands where He cannot put it down or mislay it.

And you are graven on hands that do not forget. The word says behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands, and it says it as something already done rather than promised, and the Spirit is the one who makes that carry weight in a man holding a photograph he was too small to be in.

And your standing has never rested on your recall. The word says by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, and the Spirit is the one who makes not of yourselves include your memory, which is the part nobody thinks to apply it to.

A thing that was not yours to arrange

Here is the part that turned it over for Rhys, and it came from the photograph itself.

In the picture, his mother is not looking at the camera. She is looking at him.

He was not organizing that morning. He did not book it, did not choose the people, did not decide the words. Every single thing in that frame was done for him by somebody else while he did nothing whatever except exist.

Which is, if you sit with it for a moment, an uncomfortably accurate picture of the entire gospel.

And you were never the one arranging any of it. The word says herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and the Spirit is the one who lets that land as relief rather than as a demotion in somebody who has been trying to shore up a morning from the outside.

What to do with the sentence at the table

Now, being honest with you, because I am not going to leave a real question unanswered by waving at it.

If, after all this, you find that you want to talk to somebody about the water, then talk to somebody. Go to a person you actually trust, in a place where you are actually known, and say it out loud. That is the whole instruction and I am stopping there deliberately: I am not going to tell you what to conclude, and I am certainly not going to tell you where or how to do anything, because you are a person on the other side of a screen and I do not know your circumstances.

Find someone. That is it. That is the entire advice this article contains.

What I am telling you is that you do not have to make that decision out of fear, and you do not have to make it this week, and the thing you decide will not be the thing that holds you.

And you are not standing on a decision, you are standing on Him. The word says other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ, and the Spirit is the one who makes a foundation feel like ground under a man who has been treating his own certainty as the floor.