Written in the Book Before She Could See It

The phone is going round the kitchen the way phones do at these things, and it has now been handed to four people who all have to do the thing with the fingers to make it bigger.

Sunday. Somebody's kitchen. Rice on the stove, three conversations, a baby on somebody's hip who is being spoken to in two languages at once.

The photograph is from years ago. A garden, a lot of people, a table. Somebody's christening, apparently.

And she is in it, on the left, holding a plate and laughing at something out of shot.

She was not there.

Well. She was there, obviously, she is in the photograph. But she has no memory of that day. Not a fragment. Not the garden, not the christening, not the dress she is wearing in it, which she liked, which she remembers owning and cannot place at that table.

Everybody else is saying do you remember when and she is nodding.

And underneath that, quietly, something has started that is worse than the gap. She has begun holding the gap up as evidence: look how absent I was. This is proof. There is a hole where a person should be.

Come and stand by the stove with me, sister, where it is loud enough to talk. Because there is a verse about a book with days written in it and it settles who was keeping the record.

All of them, written, before there was one of them

Psalm 139 is the psalm about being known, and near the end of it David says something that goes further than most people notice.

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

Read the last clause slowly. When as yet there was none of them.

The writing happened before the days did. The record was not made by living the days and remembering them afterward. It was written in advance, in His book, before a single one of them existed.

Which means the record of your life has never been dependent on your ability to recall it. The keeping of it was done in a different place, by somebody else, in advance.

You are written into a book that was filled in before any of the days happened, and your memory was never the medium the record was kept in. That is not a soft way round a real gap; Psalm 139:16 says when as yet there was none of them, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the most searching psalm in the book and lays it in a loud kitchen with rice on the stove and a phone going round. What you cannot recall was not lost. It was simply never yours to file.

Now the evidence, and this is what I actually want to deal with.

You are holding a gap up as proof. And I want you to notice what a strange piece of evidence that is, because you are using an absence to prove something.

A hole in a memory does not tell you what was in the room. It tells you that a memory did not form, and memories fail to form for a great many reasons: tiredness, being at the edge of a crowd, having a great deal on, being in a season where things did not lodge.

That is a fact about storage. You have been reading it as a fact about presence.

You are reading a storage failure as a verdict about your presence, and those are not the same thing at all. Psalm 103:14 says he knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are dust, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a specific mercy about a human memory rather than a general remark about weakness.

What the photograph actually shows

One more thing, and it is right in front of you and you have not looked at it.

Look at the photograph again. What is the woman on the left doing?

She is holding a plate and laughing at something out of shot.

That is not a picture of an absent person. That is a picture of a woman at a table with people she loves, laughing at something somebody said. You are looking at photographic evidence of yourself being present and using it to argue that you were not.

The gap is in your memory. It is not in the day. The day happened, and you were in it, and there is a photograph.

You are looking at a picture of yourself present and using it to prove an absence, and the day happened whether or not it was recorded in you. Ecclesiastes 3:1 says to every thing there is a season, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a season a real thing that occurred rather than a thing that only counts if somebody remembers it.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than say yes when people ask if you remember.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed there is. Not how much of the last decade you can bring back. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.