Four People and Nobody Remembers

Tomas is forty one years old and he has written four names on the back of an envelope.

That is how it started. Not with a crisis and not with a sermon. With an envelope on a kitchen table on a wet Tuesday and four names, and beside each name a note about how to reach them, because two of them he had not spoken to in eleven years.

What he wanted was very simple and he had never once said it out loud. He wanted somebody to tell him what happened.

He was too small. That is the whole difficulty. He has no memory of it, not a flicker, not a smell, not a scrap of a sensation, and for most of his life that was a fact like any other fact about his early years. Then somewhere in his thirties it stopped being a fact and became a question, and the question grew a small cold room of its own somewhere behind his ribs, and he has been visiting it late at night ever since without telling a living soul.

So he rang the four.

His mother remembered the coat. A pale coat that did not fit her properly and a hat she hated. She was very sure about the coat and she laughed about the hat, and she could not tell him one word that was said.

The second name was an aunt, and the aunt remembered the weather. Rain, she said. Terrible rain, and everybody's shoes. She remembered the shoes drying by a stove afterwards. Nothing else.

The third had been a neighbor, an old man now, and he remembered a cake with a burnt corner and an argument about whether to cut it. He was delighted to be asked. He remembered nothing whatsoever about the rest of it.

The fourth said he had been there and then, mid sentence, said actually no, that was a different year, that was somebody else's family, he was sorry, he was getting old.

Tomas sat with the envelope and four contradicting fragments and felt something in his chest go very quiet.

There was a fifth person, not on the list, because she was ninety and everybody assumed she would not know. He went anyway, on the Saturday, because he had nothing left to lose and she liked visitors.

He asked her the same question he had asked the others and she said no. Plainly, without apology, the way the very old say things. She said: I do not remember a word of it, son. Nobody would.

And then she said the thing he had actually driven forty miles for, and she did not know she was saying it.

She said: but I know whose you were. Everybody in that room knew whose you were.

He drove home with nothing he had asked for and something he had not thought to ask for, and he had to stop the car twice.

The seal is not in your handwriting

Let me say first what I am not going to do, and let me say it plainly, because you may have arrived here braced for it.

I am not going to rule on your day. Not one way and not the other. I will not tell you it counted and I will not tell you it did not, and if you have been hoping somebody would finally settle it, I am sorry, and I would rather disappoint you honestly than hand you a verdict I have no business handing anyone. That question belongs to you and to God and to people who actually know you and can sit with you unhurried, and this page is not a bench.

But there is something underneath the question that I can put in your hands, and I think it is the thing you actually came for.

You have been trying to remember your way to solid ground.

Look at what you have been doing for years. You have been going back through a day you cannot reach, looking for a moment you could stand on, some detail that would settle it, and every time you go back you come out with nothing, and every time you come out with nothing the room behind your ribs gets a little colder. And here is what makes it so quietly cruel: the harder you look, the more it seems the emptiness must mean something. If there is nothing there, perhaps there was nothing there.

Now hear what Paul wrote to a young man, in a letter written while people around him were unsettling everybody's confidence.

But God's firm foundation stands, bearing this seal: "The Lord knows those who are his."2 Timothy 2:19

Take that apart slowly, because every word in it is load bearing.

God's firm foundation stands. Present tense. Not it stood, not it may stand. It is standing now, while you are sitting there wondering, and its standing is not connected in any way to whether you can see it.

You are known by the Lord, and the knowing runs from His side to yours rather than the other way. Scripture makes that the seal on the foundation itself, and the Holy Spirit in you is the guarantee that nothing of yours depends on a recollection.

Bearing this seal. A seal is not a feeling and it is not a memory. In the ancient world a seal was pressed into wax or clay by somebody with the authority to press it, and the whole point of a seal is that its validity has nothing to do with the object it is pressed into. The clay does not certify the seal. The seal certifies the clay. A jar did not have to remember being sealed in order to be sealed.

And then the words themselves. The Lord knows those who are his.

Not: those who are His remember correctly.

Not: those who are His can produce witnesses.

Not: those who are His have an unbroken account of every important day.

The Lord knows. The knowing is His, the record is His, the seal is His, and the sentence is deliberately built so that the certainty sits on His side and not on yours. Paul chose that line, out of everything he could have chosen, precisely for people whose confidence was being shaken by things they could not verify.

You are standing on a foundation that stands sure while everything above it is being argued about. The written word says nevertheless, which is the word for exactly your position, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you standing on it without the proof.

So let me put it to you the way the old woman put it to Tomas.

Nobody in that room could tell you what was said. But somebody has always known whose you were.

And notice what this does not take away from you. It does not close anything down. If the water is a live question for you, it stays a live question and it is a good and honorable one, and one day you may want to sit with someone who knows you and talk it through properly and unhurriedly, and there is no shame in that, and there is no shame in never doing it either. What this takes away is the fear underneath. You are not standing on a day. You never were. You are standing on a foundation that was laid by Somebody else and sealed by Somebody else, and it does not become less solid because the clay has no recollection of the pressing.

God is doing this today, in ordinary kitchens, for ordinary people who assumed the question would follow them the rest of their lives. He is doing it where you are sitting. It is not for whoever you imagine has a clearer story than you. It is for you, personally, exactly as you are, with the envelope in front of you and nothing written on it.

You are His, and you were His on a day four people attended and nobody wrote down. Scripture puts the seal on God's knowing rather than on anybody's record, and the Holy Spirit in you is the deposit He gave instead of the receipt you wanted.