I Went Because The Line Was Going

Cabin seven. Nine years old. A green swimming costume with a frill on it that she hated and that her mother had packed anyway.

It was the last full day, and there had been a thing in the big hall after supper, and she remembers almost none of what was said and all of what the room felt like, which was hot and full of moths because somebody had left the doors open for the air.

At some point a man at the front said something, and people started standing up, and the girls in cabin seven stood up more or less together the way nine-year-olds do everything, and then there was a line down the middle of the hall and out the side door toward the lake, and she was in it.

She has thought about that line for twenty years.

Not constantly. It goes months without occurring to her. But it comes back, usually somewhere quiet and inconvenient, and it always comes back as the same question in the same shape: did I go, or did I just walk?

Because here is what she can honestly report. She remembers the moths. She remembers that Katie Beddows was in front of her and had a braid that had come half out. She remembers that the grass was wet and colder than the water. She remembers a woman she did not know putting a hand on her back very gently at the top of the steps and saying "It is not deep, sweetheart."

And she does not remember deciding anything. Not one moment of it. There is no instant in that evening that she can point to and say: that is when I meant it.

She is twenty-nine now, and she is not a lukewarm person about God. She is the opposite. She is the one who stays behind and stacks chairs and cries in the third song and has read her Bible on a bus for eleven years.

But there is a small cold place, and it has this in it: the whole cabin was going, and I went because the line was going, and I do not know what I was.

She has never said it to anybody. Not once. Not to her husband and not to the woman who has discipled her for six years, because saying it out loud would make it a thing, and because she is frightened of the answer, and because a person can love God enormously and still be nine years old about one particular question.

Nobody is putting a nine-year-old on the stand

I want to do the most important thing first.

I am not going to put your nine-year-old self on trial.

That is what you have been afraid of, and I think it is why this has never been said out loud in twenty years: some part of you has expected that the moment it was examined, a case would be opened about the intentions of a child in a green costume with a frill, and that the child would not do very well under questioning.

There is no case. Nobody is opening one. God is not cross-examining a nine-year-old in a hot hall full of moths, and He never was, and the reason I can say that flatly is not kindness. It is that the whole matter rests somewhere else entirely.

Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.Philippians 1:6

Look at who the actor is in that sentence. Not the reader. Not once. He began it, He performs it, He carries it to the day of Jesus Christ, and the only thing the reader does in the entire verse is be confident about somebody else's reliability.

You are a good work that God began, and the beginning of it is His to date and not yours to reconstruct, and that is not my consolation prize for a woman with a bad memory, it is the written word, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is going into the cold place rather than into your general theology.

And notice that Paul writes this to a whole church, none of whose conversion moments he is auditing. He does not say because I remember the night each of you decided. He says he is confident about what God does, and that confidence is about the workman, not the record.

Now let me name what I think the real fear is, because I do not think it is about the lake.

The fear is that your entire faith might be a very long momentum. That you were a girl who went where the cabin went, and then a teenager who went where the youth group went, and then a woman who stacks chairs and cries in the third song, and that underneath all of it there has never been a moment that was actually you.

I want to answer that carefully, because it deserves care.

You have been kept by God for twenty years and momentum does not do that. Eleven years of a Bible on a bus is not a girl following a line out of a side door. Scripture says He performs the work He began, and the Spirit of God who has been in you through all of it is the evidence that something was begun, and it is evidence you can actually see, unlike a memory of an evening.

And here is the thing I most want you to have.

You are not required to produce the moment. Not to God and not to anybody. The word puts the beginning in His hands and the performing in His hands and the completion in His hands, and nowhere in that sentence is there a requirement that the person being worked on can testify to the hour. The Holy Spirit is the evidence you can actually see, and He has been in you since a hot hall full of moths.

Some people can. Some people have a date and a chair and a sentence they remember. That is a real mercy and it is not the mechanism, and a woman who has none of it is not on a lower footing than a woman who has all of it.

You were His that night and you are His this morning, and the Spirit is the deposit, and there is nothing in the whole of Scripture that puts a nine-year-old's clarity of intention between a person and the work God has begun in them.