My Mothers Words In My Own Mouth

Four lines. His mother said them over him every single night until he was about eleven and told her not to.

He remembers the exact evening he told her not to. He was in a bad mood about something at school and he said it in a way he has thought about for twenty five years, and she said all right, love, and turned the light off, and never said them again.

She said them the night before her operation, to herself, and he heard it through a door.

Now he has a four year old, and the four lines have come back out of him without being sent for, and he says them every night at the side of a bed with a lamp on.

And they sound like nothing.

That is the whole of the problem and he cannot get anybody to understand it when he tries to explain it. It is not that he does not mean them. He means every word. It is that when she said them there was something in the room afterwards, an actual difference in the air, and when he says them there is a man in a bedroom saying four lines and then the sound of him standing up.

He has tried saying them slower. He has tried saying them the way she said them, which lasted two nights and made him feel like a man doing an impression.

Last Thursday the boy said, halfway through, in the way four year olds do: you say it wrong.

He asked him what he meant. The boy could not tell him and lost interest and asked for water.

He has not been able to put it down since.

First in thy grandmother, and then in thy mother, and then in thee

Sit down on the edge of that bed, because there is a sentence Paul writes to a young man that describes this exact handover, and it names three generations in one line.

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.2 Timothy 1:5

Dwelt first in thy grandmother. And thy mother. And in thee.

Three houses. Same faith. And notice that Paul does not say it arrived in Timothy intact and identical, and he does not say Timothy carried it the way Lois did.

He says it dwelt in her, and in her daughter, and now in him, and he is persuaded of it, which is a word about somebody looking from outside at a young man who very likely could not feel a thing.

Hear this at the side of that bed. You are not doing an impression, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture names a faith moving through three generations of one family, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carried it, and it never once came out of the second mouth sounding like the first.

Now let me name what you are actually comparing, because the comparison is unfair in a way you cannot see from inside it.

You are comparing being prayed over with praying, and the written word never once set the two side by side, and the Holy Spirit is in both of them equally.

Those are two completely different experiences and they never feel the same, and every single person who has ever done both has noticed exactly what you have noticed.

When she said those four lines you were a child in a bed with the covers up and somebody bigger than you was doing something on your behalf that you did not have to help with. Of course the air was different. You were receiving, and the Holy Spirit was carrying a written word into a child who had to do nothing at all.

You are now the one giving, and the giver never feels the gift. The person carrying a child does not experience being carried, and no amount of doing it more sincerely will produce that, because it is not available from where you are standing.

Hear this too. You have not lost anything, and Scripture is what says so. What is written puts an unfeigned faith into a third generation without any report of how it felt in his chest, and the Spirit of God is the one who made the air different in your bedroom in 1998, and He is the one doing it now, and neither time was it your mother.

And now what your son said, because it has been sitting in you since Thursday and it is not what you think.

You say it wrong.

He is four. He does not mean you are a fraud, and nothing written in Scripture says you are, and the Holy Spirit is not saying it either. He almost certainly means that you say it faster than he wants, or that you did not do the thing with the last line, or that his mother says it differently, or something else entirely that he has already forgotten.

But here is the part worth keeping, and it is enormous.

He noticed. Which means he is listening. Which means at four years old he already has a correct version in his head that yours can be measured against, and the only way that got in there is that the Holy Spirit has been carrying a written truth out of your flat voice, at the side of that bed, every night, exactly as it was carried into you.

It is already in him. That is what he was telling you.