My Mother's Faith and No Sentence of My Own

It was her niece who noticed, which is usually how it goes.

Corinne is fifty-four and she had been talking about something hard that had happened in the family, and she said what she always says, which is a thing about God knowing what He is doing.

And her niece, who is twenty-two and not unkind at all, tilted her head and said, that's exactly how Nana says it.

Not as a criticism. As a piece of pleasant observation, the way young people notice family resemblances.

And Corinne laughed and said something about how she supposed it was, and then she went out to the kitchen and stood at the counter for a while.

Because it is not just that sentence.

She has been checking since, quietly, for about six weeks, and every single thing she says about God is in her mother's words. The way she talks about trouble. The way she talks about waiting. The two phrases she uses when somebody is ill, both of which she has heard her mother say a hundred times over a bowl on a porch.

Even the pause. She does the pause her mother does before the last part of the sentence.

And here is the thing she cannot get round. She believes all of it. That is not in question. She would not swap her mother's faith for anybody's and she has seen it hold under weight that would have flattened most people, and there is nothing false about Corinne at all.

It is that she has never once, in fifty-four years, said anything about God in a sentence she made herself.

Not one. She has looked. Six weeks of looking and she cannot find a single one.

She has inherited a house, fully furnished, and lived in it happily her whole life, and she has never bought so much as a chair.

And what has come up with that, in the last fortnight, is a small and frightening question that she has not said to anybody. If everything she has is her mother's, what does she actually have?

And you may know that porch. You may hear somebody else's phrasing coming out of your own mouth about the most important thing in your life, and you may have loved them very much, which is exactly what makes it so hard to look at.

The one instruction in the psalm cannot be done on anybody's behalf

Take this off first, my love, because you have been carrying it six weeks and it was never yours.

You are not living on borrowed faith. You never were. Scripture gives an instruction here that only ever works first hand, and it hands it to ordinary people without any qualification at all, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the originality of your words, who makes it real in a person. Set it down here on the counter. It is heavy, and there is nothing shameful under it.

Now hear the sentence, and notice that it is a command about the mouth.

Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in Him.Psalm 34:8

Taste.

There is no other verb in Scripture quite like it for this. You can be told about a thing. You can be handed a description of it, and a good description from somebody who loves you is a real gift.

But nobody has ever tasted anything on your behalf.

Your mother's words are a description, and they are a good one, and they came out of her own tasting over sixty years. What she cannot do, and never could, is do the tasting for you.

Which means the question is not whether your words are yours. It is whether you have tasted, and Corinne, you have, and the tasting is what His word actually asks for and what His Spirit already did in you.

You have. The year your husband was out of work. The morning in the hospital corridor. The thing that happened at the funeral that you have never explained to anybody because there are no words for it in your mother's vocabulary or in anybody else's.

Those are yours. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who was in all three of them, and none of it was secondhand for one second.

Now let me be careful, because there is a ditch on this side and I have no intention of putting you in it.

Nothing here says your mother's faith is a problem or that inherited words are a lesser kind. They are not. Half the church is standing on a grandmother's phrasing and God is not embarrassed by that, and the words you have been given have held people up in rooms where nothing else would have, and His Spirit has been in every one of those rooms, and Scripture is glad of them.

Keep them. Say them at the bedsides. They work.

The point is only that you have never made one of your own, and so you have never found out what you would say, and not knowing that is what has been frightening you at the counter. Scripture is not asking for a better sentence and His Spirit is not comparing.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. You are not afraid there is nothing there, and His Spirit knows exactly what is.

You are afraid that if you go looking, what you find will be smaller than hers, and it might be. Hers is sixty years old and yours has never once been said out loud.

Scripture says taste and see, and His Spirit is the one who has already given you three things to taste, and neither of them has ever compared one woman's sentence to another woman's.