Godparents I Have Never Met

Padrinos: Rogelio A. and Herminia S.

That is what it says. Two first names, two initials, in a hand that slopes hard to the right, on a card that has been in the same envelope in the same box since his mother packed it in 1988.

He has never met either of them.

He has asked. He asked his mother when he was nineteen and she said, "Ay, they were the couple from the other side, from your father's town," and then the phone rang or something boiled over and that was the end of it. He asked an aunt at a funeral and got a different couple entirely, confidently, with details. He asked his father once, in a car, and his father was quiet for a while and then said, "It was arranged," which is a complete sentence in that family and closes a subject.

So there are two people whose names he can pronounce, who stood somewhere and said something on his behalf while he was small enough to be handed across, and he could pass either of them in a supermarket for the rest of his life and never know it.

He is forty-four.

He runs a good household. He prays out loud at his own table now and his children find it entirely normal, which is not how he grew up, and there is nothing in his faith that is borrowed or performed. He got there himself, at thirty-one, in a bad year, in a way he could describe to you in detail if you had an hour.

And under all of it, quietly, there is this: the beginning of his religious life is a transaction he had no part in, conducted by strangers, recorded in a hand he does not recognize.

It is not that he thinks it did not count. He genuinely does not know what he thinks about that and has decided he is allowed not to.

What sits in him is smaller and harder to name. It is the feeling of having been entered into something rather than having entered it. Of being the object of an arrangement. And when things are hard, and they have been hard twice, that feeling comes and stands at the end of the bed and says: you were signed up. Somebody else's paperwork. How much of this is actually yours?

Whose confidence is holding this

I am not going to adjudicate the card.

I want to say that clearly because you have been braced for it since the second paragraph. I am not going to tell you what Rogelio and Herminia did or did not accomplish, or whether an arrangement made by adults on behalf of a child in a town you have never seen is one thing or another thing. That question has better and worse answers and I am not qualified to hand you one across a page, and a man who does that to you is more interested in being right than in you.

What I want to do is find out where your confidence has been living, because I think it has been living in the wrong house.

For the which cause I also suffer these things: nevertheless I am not ashamed: for I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.2 Timothy 1:12

Look at what Paul does not say. He does not say I know what I have believed, which would put the weight on the content and the accuracy and the paperwork. He says I know whom. The confidence is in a person, and the sentence is built so that the person is the load-bearing part of it.

And then look at the verb. He is able to keep. The keeping is God's job. Paul's contribution to the entire arrangement was the handing over, once, and the rest of the sentence is about somebody else's competence.

You have committed yourself to Him and He is able to keep it, and that is not my encouragement to a man with a documentation problem, it is the written word, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is going into your chest rather than being filed with the other true things you know.

Now let me name the thing at the end of the bed, because I do not think anybody has ever named it to you.

It is not doubt about God. You would say that yourself. It is a suspicion that your position was assigned rather than taken, and therefore that it might not hold under real weight, the way a signature somebody else wrote for you might not hold in a court.

That suspicion has been given a great deal of standing in your house for a very long time, and it is time it lost some.

You handed yourself over at thirty-one, in a bad year, in your own words, and that was you, not an arrangement, and Scripture says the One you handed it to is able to keep it, and the Spirit of God who came and made your table into a place where a man prays out loud in front of his children is the evidence in the room.

I want to say something about the two names, though, because I do not want to sail past them.

You have never once said those names out loud. Not to your wife, not to your children, not to anybody. You can pronounce them, and you have read them privately more times than you would admit, and they have never come out of your mouth in a room with air in it. Scripture says I know whom I have believed, which puts the weight on a person rather than on a card, and the Holy Spirit has been the earnest of that in you since a bad year at thirty-one.

Say them. Not as a verdict on anything. Just as an acknowledgement that two people stood somewhere and said something on behalf of a child who could not speak, and that whatever else that was, it was not nothing, and God was not absent from it.

And then let this be over the top of it: you are not the object of somebody else's paperwork. The word says the keeping belongs to the One you committed yourself to, and the Spirit inside you is God's own earnest on that, and neither of them has ever depended on your having chosen your own godparents.

You are kept by somebody who is able to keep what was committed to Him. The word says I know whom I have believed, which puts the confidence in a person, and the Holy Spirit is the earnest God put in a man who prays out loud at his own table.