They always ask her. That is simply how it is in that church, and has been for the better part of twenty years: when there is a visitor who needs lifting, or a new believer wobbling, or a Sunday where the room has gone flat, somebody looks across at her and says her name, and she gets up.
And she can tell it. She can tell it standing on a chair in a fellowship hall with tea going cold on forty saucers and the whole place forgetting to breathe.
Tonight it is the anniversary weekend, and a girl of nineteen with a bright face and a notebook has been going round the tables all evening gathering things for the display. She is lovely. She waits until the laughing dies down and then she says, "Auntie, can I ask you three quick ones, just so I get it right?"
Three quick ones.
"What month was it?"
And she opens her mouth and the answer is not there. She says around Easter, because that is what she has always said, and then she remembers the heating being on and the coats, which cannot be Easter. She says, "Put winter."
"And how long was it between when you started praying and when it happened?"
She hears herself say a long time. The girl waits, pen up, kind as anything. And the woman realizes that she has told this story from the front of a room upward of two hundred times, and that the gap has been three months in some tellings and the best part of a year in others, and she has no idea which one is true, and she has never once checked, because there has never been anything to check it against.
"And who else was there?"
Now here is where the floor goes.
Because there was one other person in the room that day, and it was Sister Bernice, who has been in the ground four years this coming August, and who was the only living human being besides herself who could have said yes, that is how it went.
The girl writes something small and says thank you, Auntie, that is beautiful, and goes off to the next table.
And the woman sits down on a stacking chair with her handbag on her knees in a hall full of noise, and does her arithmetic, and comes to the bottom of it.
The greatest thing God ever did for her exists in exactly one place in the world.
A mouth. Her own. And she has been rebuilding it from scratch every time somebody asks, the way you rebuild a wall from a photograph, and every rebuild has sanded a corner off, and there is no original left to check it against.
You are not a liar and neither is she. You are a woman with a marvelous memory and no record, which is a completely different problem and a much easier one to fix.
God asked for both, in one sentence
There is a moment after the battle at Rephidim where God gives Moses an instruction, and I want you to notice that it has two halves joined by an and.
And the LORD said unto Moses, Write this for a memorial in a book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua.Exodus 17:14
Write it. And say it out loud to the man who has to carry it next.
That is one command with two hands on it, and most of us are strong in one hand and have never once used the other. There are believers who write beautifully and would sooner be swallowed by the floor than stand up in a fellowship hall. And there are women like you, who can hold a room of four hundred and have not put one word of it on paper in twenty years.
So take this before we go a line further. You are not deficient in the telling and you were never asked to be quieter. What has gone missing is the book, and Exodus 17:14 asks for the book and the ears in the same breath, and the Holy Spirit who has been giving you the words in front of the room is more than willing to sit down at a table with you and go slower.
What He established, and what He appointed
Psalm 78 is not a sentimental psalm about happy memories. Look at the verbs.
He established a testimony in Jacob, and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers, that they should make them known to their children: that the generation to come might know them, even the children which should be born; who should arise and declare them to their children: that they might set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God.Psalm 78:5-7
Established. Appointed. Commanded. Those are not mood words, they are institution words. God did not leave the remembering of what He had done to whoever happened to be in a good frame of mind on the day. He built a structure around it, because He knows exactly what a generation is like and He knows precisely what an unrecorded story does over forty years.
And read what the whole apparatus is for, right at the end of it: that they might set their hope in God. Not that the room might get lifted. Not that the anniversary display might look well. A child, not yet born when it happened, putting their hope somewhere solid because somebody kept the thing straight.
You have been carrying a piece of that structure in your mouth for twenty years, and you were carrying it faithfully, and now Psalm 78:6 is asking for it in a form that outlives you. The Spirit who established that testimony in Jacob is not asking for a better performance out of you. He is asking for a line and a date.
And it does not have to be the big one
Now I have to say the thing that keeps women like us from ever starting, because it is the real reason the notebook stays empty.
We have one enormous story, and we have quietly decided that only enormous things go in the book. So the tin stays empty for years while we wait for something worthy of it, and meanwhile the ordinary mercies come and go unrecorded at the rate of about three a month.
Psalm 78 says His works and His wonders in the same breath as His strength, and nowhere does it grade them or set a minimum. A morning that went better than it had any business going is an entry. A phone call at the right hour is an entry. The week the thing you dreaded turned out to be nothing at all is an entry, and you have never once counted it because nothing happened, which is exactly the point and you missed it.
You have a great deal more to write down than you think, and you were given every one of them, small and large, without a scale. Psalm 78:4 calls them His wonderful works that He hath done, plural and unranked, and the Holy Spirit is bringing three of them up in you right now while you sit there telling yourself you only have the one.
Nothing about your gift has been criticized tonight. Get that clear before anything else, because a woman who tells it well is a mercy to a congregation and I would not take one decibel off you.
What has happened is that the second half of the command has come back into view. You are a woman with a memorial and no book, and you have been that since the winter it happened, and Exodus 17:14 asks for both from the same person on the same day. The Holy Spirit is not sending you away to become somebody quieter and more organized. He is putting a pen in a hand that has been raised in the air for twenty years.
And Sister Bernice is not the last witness after all. The One who was actually in the room that day has not gone anywhere, and His word says He appointed the keeping of it.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud with the pen in your hand, at your own volume, which we both know is not small. Your right to speak like this was not earned by twenty years of telling it well: you are in Christ, and the keeping of His works belongs to you the way an inheritance belongs to an heir, and the Spirit who inspired Psalm 78:5 is what makes the writing more than a hobby. Speak to the story first, then to the thing that has kept your pen down all this time, then to God, and whatever He does with the pages after you are gone is His to decide, in His own way.
- Story that lives in my mouth alone, you are going down on paper today. Exodus 17:14 says write it in a book and rehearse it in his ears, and God asked for both halves from the same woman on the same day. You are getting a date on you before I sleep.
- Voice that says it shrinks on paper, get out from under my pen in the name of Jesus. Psalm 78:4 calls them His wonderful works that He hath done, plural and unranked, and small and dated has always outlived enormous and vague. His Spirit is bringing three of them back to me tonight and I am writing all three.
- Lord, You established the testimony and You appointed the keeping of it, and You did not leave that to whoever was in a good mood. Your word says in Psalm 78:6 that a child not yet born is meant to set their hope on this, and Your Holy Spirit was the only other witness in that room and He has not gone anywhere. I am writing the winter one down tonight, and I am starting the tin.
Psalm 78:4-7
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