I Just Always Knew

She is forty-four and she is getting baptized on the twelfth, and there is a card on the passenger seat of her car with two questions printed on it.

The first one says: what was your life like before you met Jesus?

The second one says: what changed?

She has been sitting in the car park of the retail place behind the church for twenty minutes with the engine off and a pen in her hand, and she has written her name at the top and nothing else.

Because there was no before.

She cannot get behind it. She has gone back as far as she can go and He is already there: a bedroom with a paper lampshade and a woman she thinks was her mum's aunt saying something about Jesus at the door, and being four, and knowing. Not deciding. Knowing, the way you know your own name is yours. And then school, and being fifteen and not going to church for eleven years and still praying in her head on the bus, and coming back at twenty-nine, and forty-four now, and the whole thing running underneath the entire time like a pipe under a road.

There is no night. There is no floor she hit. There is no moment she can point at and say, there, that is where it turned, because as far as she can see it never turned, it was simply always on.

And three weeks ago at the front of the room a lovely man asked the group for their stories, and she said, honestly, I don't really have one, I just always knew. And he smiled and said, oh that's lovely, and then he said the thing.

He said: though that's not really a testimony as such, is it. There has to be a before and an after.

He was not being cruel. He was reading off a form in his head that somebody gave him thirty years ago and he has never questioned it, and it went in like a splinter and it has been in ever since.

Because now she has a card with two boxes on it and she has nothing for the first one, and she has started to think something she has never thought in forty years of believing: maybe I am the one in this room who is not actually in.

Maybe I inherited it. Maybe it was a bedroom and a lampshade and a kind aunt and I have been coasting on somebody else's electricity ever since. Maybe if it were real there would have been a night.

She puts the card in the glovebox and drives home.

Your account starts earlier than your memory does

There is a psalm that goes further back than anybody's first bedroom, and it says a thing about God's records that settles this whole question if you will read it slowly.

Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.Psalm 139:16

Look at the order in that verse. The book came first. Before there was a face, before there was a name, before there was a day one to be the beginning of anything, there was a written page with this person on it.

Which means your record does not start where your recollection starts. It never did. You were in a book before you were in a bedroom, and the fact that you cannot get behind your own knowing is not a hole in your account. It is the top of the page.

You are written down, and you were written down before you had a single memory to compare it against. I am not saying that to be nice: Psalm 139:16 puts the writing before the forming, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes that order and makes it land in a woman sitting in a car park with a blank box. Your file did not start when you noticed. It started when He wrote.

A form is a form. It was never doctrine.

Now, gently, about the man with the two boxes.

He is not your enemy and he was not being unkind, and the shape he handed you is a real shape: for a great many people it is exactly right, and their before is grim and their after is glorious and God should be loud about it.

But the two boxes are a form. Somebody made it. It is not in the text.

Look at what Paul says to Timothy, who by any honest reading is your relative:

And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.2 Timothy 3:15

From a child. There is no before in that sentence either. Paul does not follow it up with a note of concern about whether the young man's account will hold up at the front of a room. He treats it as an advantage.

Right now, as you read, you are inside the same covenant as the loudest story in your church, and it is already yours in Christ rather than pending on an account. Scripture keeps its record of what God did rather than of what anybody noticed Him doing, and the Holy Spirit is the One pressing that difference into you at the exact spot where a splinter went in three weeks ago.

What a testimony actually is, and what it is not

Here is where the splinter came from, and once you see it you can take it out yourself.

A testimony is not the record of your turning. It is the record of His doing. The turning is a wonderful thing to have on the page and it is not the page.

So the question is not, when did you flip. The question is, what has He done. And once you ask it that way, a woman who has believed since she was four is not a woman with nothing. She is a woman with forty years of material she has never once counted, because she was measuring it against somebody else's paperwork.

Eleven years of not going to church and praying on a bus anyway. That is Him. A knowing at four that never came off, through the fifteens and the twenty-somethings and everything that has happened since. That is Him, and holding on to a person for forty years is not a smaller work than turning one round in a night. It is the same God doing the same keeping with more patience.

You have not been coasting on somebody else's electricity, and that is settled by Christ and not by your paperwork. His word says He has loved us with an everlasting love and therefore drawn us, in Jeremiah 31:3, and the Spirit who drew a four year old in a room with a paper lampshade is the same Spirit who has kept her since.