What My Grandmother Had

Everybody in that family knew about Nalani, and nobody in three generations has ever said the sentence out loud, which is how these things work.

She prayed for people and things happened. Not always, and she would have been the first to say so, and she was suspicious of anybody who claimed a run of it. But often enough that people came from other islands, and often enough that the family stopped remarking on it, the way you stop remarking on weather.

Ikaika is her grandson. He is fifty-two. He was in that house constantly until he was nineteen.

And he has spent his whole adult life quietly failing a comparison that nobody ever made out loud and that he has never once been able to put down.

Nothing like that happens when he prays. He prays. He prays properly, for people, by name, for years. He is, if you asked anybody in that family who they would ring at two in the morning, the answer.

But there is no room going quiet when he comes in. There is no sense of something arriving. He has never once had the thing she had, and he grew up close enough to it to know exactly what it looked like, which is the part that makes it worse rather than better.

He was at a funeral last year and a very old woman he did not know took his hand and said you are Nalani's, with real warmth, and he said yes, and she looked at him for a moment longer than was comfortable and then said something kind and moved on.

He thought about that look for four months.

You may have your own Nalani.

A grandmother, an uncle, a first pastor, somebody in your family who plainly had something. And you have been standing in a comparison your whole life that nobody ever formally opened.

Paul names a grandmother and then turns

There is a place in Paul's last letter where he does exactly this, and then does something with it that I want you to watch closely.

When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also. Wherefore I put thee in remembrance that thou stir up the gift of God, which is in thee by the putting on of my hands.2 Timothy 1:5-6

First he names the grandmother. Lois. She is in there by name, and Paul is not being sentimental; he is establishing a line.

And then, immediately, he turns and puts the whole weight on Timothy. In thee also. And then, in the very next breath, the gift of God, which is in thee.

Not: the gift your grandmother had, which you should hope to be given a copy of. The gift which is in thee.

And what is in you is yours and not a copy of hers. The written word names the grandmother and then turns and puts the possessive on the grandson twice in two verses, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a man who has been failing a comparison since he was nineteen.

And you are not waiting to inherit something. The word says the gift of God which is in thee, in the present tense, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than processing a bequest.

What she actually handed you

Now let me put something in front of you that I think has been sitting in plain sight.

You were in that house until you were nineteen.

You are the one this whole family rings at two in the morning. That is not a small fact and you have never once counted it, because it does not look like what she had and you have only been counting things that look like what she had.

But go back and ask where that came from. A man does not become the person a family rings at two in the morning by accident. Somebody showed him what it looks like to be woken up and not mind. Somebody let him watch her do it, for nineteen years, without ever making a lesson of it.

She did hand you something. It is not the thing you have been watching for, so you have not been looking at it.

And what she gave you arrived and you have been using it for thirty years. The word says the unfeigned faith which dwelt first in thy grandmother and thy mother, and I am persuaded that in thee also, and the Spirit is the one who makes a persuaded that land in a man at a funeral being looked at a moment too long.

And you are not a lesser edition of anybody. The word says the same Spirit divides to every man severally as he will, and the Spirit is the one distributing rather than a family line where the good one ran out.

Nobody is going to rank the two of you

I want to say plainly what I am not doing here.

I am not going to tell you Nalani's thing was less than it looked. It was not. People came from other islands and things happened and she was careful and honest about it, and that is one of the good things God does in the world.

And I am not going to enter any argument about how it works, or whether it is one experience or two, or what the evidence is. Sincere people have divided over all of that for a long time and you did not arrive to be enrolled.

There is no exam here and no way to fail it.

And you cannot fail a category on this page. The word makes the Spirit a wind beyond anybody's accounting, and a thing beyond accounting has no scale to be placed on, and the Spirit is the one who settles rather than measures.