I Am Not Sure My Memory Of It Is Honest

He has told it perhaps two hundred times, and somewhere in the last few years he has begun to hear himself telling it, which has been the end of something.

He was there. That is not in question. He was twenty six, he was in that room for the whole of it, and something happened to him that reorganized the next twenty years of his life.

What he has started to doubt is the size of it. Because he knows what happens to a story that gets told two hundred times. He knows that each telling shaves a rough edge and adds a beat, and that a man cannot tell the same account for two decades without the account improving.

So there is a thought that arrives now, usually when somebody younger asks him about it: what if it was ordinary? What if he has spent twenty years in the shadow of a good evening that a more careful man would have described in two sentences?

And that thought does something specific to his asking. He cannot ask for a thing to happen again when he no longer trusts his description of the first time.

If you have started to distrust your own account, come in and get a mug. Nobody who was in that room is going to be criticized here.

The asking does not rest on the description

Let us find the load bearing wall here, because he has been testing the wrong one.

He believes his request is founded on the accuracy of his memory. If it was as big as he remembers, asking is warranted. If it was smaller, the request is inflated and slightly absurd. So he has put the memory on trial and the asking has stopped while the trial runs.

But the request is not founded on the memory. It is founded on God, who is not less able because a man's account has drifted, and who was doing whatever He was doing in that room regardless of how it has been described since.

Even in the worst case, where it was much more ordinary than he says, the God who did the ordinary version is the God he is asking now.

Your asking does not rest on your memory. Nothing twenty years of telling has done to your account has ever changed what you may ask God for. I am not saying it to protect a story. Scripture says I will remember the works of the LORD: surely I will remember thy wonders of old (Psalm 77:11), which is a deliberate act of remembering chosen in the middle of a psalm full of doubt, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it hold in a man being asked about it by somebody younger.

Remembering chosen inside the doubt

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it takes nothing off anybody's account.

Read where that verse sits in the psalm, because the surroundings are the whole point.

I will remember the works of the LORD: surely I will remember thy wonders of old.Psalm 77:11

Eleven verses earlier he is asking whether God has forgotten to be gracious and whether His mercy is clean gone for ever. This is not a confident man setting down a reliable account. This is a man in the middle of serious doubt.

And what he does is choose. I will remember. It is stated as an intention rather than as a certified finding, which means the remembering is an act he performs rather than a verdict he has reached.

You may choose to remember without first certifying the memory, and Scripture has a doubting man do exactly that. That is written into the verse and its surroundings, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a man with a mug in his hand.

Nobody who was in that room is being doubted

Something must be said very plainly, or this becomes a page suggesting that everybody's memory of that season is inflated.

His caution is honest and it is unusual and it does him credit. It is also not evidence. He does not actually know that the account has grown, and there are people still alive who were in that room and could tell him, and he has never asked one of them because the question feels like an accusation.

And nothing here says the season was small. It might have been exactly what he says. This page does not know and is not pretending to.

You are asking for this again, here. The fire that stayed is the one you want, not the one you remember. Scripture says how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him (Luke 11:13), where the asking rests on the Father's character and not on the petitioner's recollection, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a verified account of twenty years ago, who is being asked for.

And if this has cost more than the friends in that kitchen know, if sleep has gone, if being asked about it has started to frighten you, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.