I Do Not Have a Story

Ruthie has sat through about four hundred testimonies and she has never once had anything to say.

She has heard the good ones. The man who came in off the street. The woman who had it all and lost it and found this instead. The one that everybody remembers, from about fifteen years ago, where the fellow could not finish because he was crying and nobody minded because it was real.

Ruthie loves those. She is not sitting there resenting anybody.

She just has nothing.

No date. She cannot tell you the year, let alone the evening. There is no before in her life, and therefore no after, and no ditch she was pulled out of.

She was in it as a small girl and she is in it now and she is seventy-three, and in between she has read that book at that kitchen table most mornings of her adult life and prayed for a list of people that has got longer as people got born and shorter as people did not.

And what has sat under her for about fifty years, so quietly that she has never once said it, is this: maybe it did not take.

Because everybody else has a moment. And a thing with no moment might be a thing that never actually happened, and she might just be somebody who was raised well and has good habits and is going to find out at the end.

They asked her to speak at something in the spring.

Ladies' evening, nothing grand, forty women and a supper. And they asked her because she is Ruthie and everybody there has been prayed for by her at some point.

And she said no.

And when her granddaughter asked why, she said, "Because I do not have a story."

And that girl, who is twenty-six and does not always think before she talks, which on this occasion was the whole point, said:

"Grandma. You have been reading that Bible at that table since before I was born. That is the story. It is just long."

Now let me ask you who yours came through.

Because if this is you, there is a name. A grandmother, an aunt, a neighbor, a woman at a school gate. Somebody in whom you first saw the thing, and you have never counted them as evidence, because you have been looking for a date instead of a line.

The one Paul was sure about

Paul is writing to a young man he loves, at the end of his own life, and this is the second sentence in the letter.

For I am mindful of the sincere faith within you, which first dwelt in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice, and I am sure that it is in you as well.2 Timothy 1:5

Read that as pastoral care, because that is what it is.

The sincere faith within you. Paul does not ask Timothy for a date. He does not ask him what he was doing before. He looks at the man in front of him and names what he sees.

Which first dwelt in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice. He traces it back along a line of women. That is Timothy's testimony, in full, as recorded in Scripture: it came through his grandmother and his mother and it is in him.

There is no ditch in it anywhere.

And then: I am sure that it is in you as well.

That is an old man being certain about somebody else's faith on the evidence of having watched it. He does not hedge. He does not say he hopes so. He says he is sure, and he says it to a man who was, on the evidence of the rest of the letter, frightened and struggling and needed to be told.

So hear this said over you, on a porch step at seventy-three. The faith in you is sincere and it has been in you for a lifetime, and the absence of a dramatic date has never once been evidence of anything except an early start. That is written into a letter Paul sent to a man with exactly your testimony, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described as bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and He has been doing that at your kitchen table every morning for fifty years.

Now let me deal with the fear itself, because I do not want to leave it sitting there.

You have been treating a moment as the proof.

And a moment is a lovely thing when God gives one, and He gives them, and the man who could not finish for crying is not making it up. But look at what a moment actually is: it is the place where a person became aware. It is not the place where God decided.

God's deciding does not happen inside anybody's biography. He chose in Christ before the foundation of the world, which means every conversion story anybody has ever told is the story of somebody catching up with something already settled, and the ones with a date are catching up loudly and the ones without are catching up slowly, and the thing they are catching up with is the same age in both cases.

So the man off the street did not get chosen more than you. He got surprised more than you.

And here is the part I want you to actually take: you have been discounting fifty years of evidence because it did not arrive as a headline.

You pray for people by name. You have kept coming when it was flat, which is most of it. You are the person forty women want to hear from, and the reason they want to hear from you is not that you are dramatic, it is that you are the most obviously real one in the room and they have all noticed it except you.

The word says by their fruit you will know them, and a fruit is a slow object and it is the measure Jesus Himself gave. And the Spirit of God is the one who bears witness with your spirit that you are a child of God, and the whole point of that verse is that the witness is His and not yours to manufacture.

This tradition has held that God works through generations, through households, through ordinary means and a long time. Not because drama is suspect, but because most of what God does in the world is slow, and a church that can only recognize Him when He is loud will miss nearly all of it, including most of its own best people.