The Day Underneath the Testimony

She can do it in four minutes or in twelve, depending on the room, and both versions land.

Yvette has told it at women's evenings, at two weddings, once at a funeral because the family asked, and more times than she can count in kitchens and cars and hospital corridors. It is a good story and it is entirely true and she has never once embellished a word of it.

Twenty-one years of telling.

And in the spring she was in a car with a woman from work, telling it for what was probably the four hundredth time, and she heard the shape of it as she was going along.

The opening. The turn in the middle. The bit where she pauses because it lands better. The line at the end that is genuinely the best line she has and that she found by accident about nine years ago and has used ever since.

She got to the end and the woman was moved, properly, and it was not manipulation and nothing about it was false.

And Yvette drove home and thought: when did I last remember that day?

Not tell it. Remember it.

And she could not get to it. She reached for the actual afternoon and what came up was the story about the afternoon, in four minutes, with the pause in the middle. Like reaching for a photograph and getting a painting somebody made of the photograph.

She was forty-two. She is sixty-three now.

There was a real day. There was a kitchen and a particular light and something in her hands and a smell she has not been able to reach for years. It happened. Nothing about the telling is untrue.

But twenty-one years of telling it well has laid something over it, and she is not sure any more whether she remembers the day or only remembers the telling, and she has never once said that out loud to anybody, because the telling is the most useful thing she owns and people have come to God through it.

And you may have your own smooth object. A story you tell beautifully and truthfully, and a day underneath it you cannot quite reach any more.

The letter opens with hands and eyes, not with a version

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it since the spring and it was never yours.

You are not a fraud for having told it well. You never were. Scripture opens one of its letters with a man reaching straight past every version and naming what he saw and touched, and it does not scold anybody for having told a story often, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the freshness of your memory, who carries a true account into anybody. Set it down here. It is heavy and it has been riding in the car with you since April.

Now hear how the letter opens, because it is physical from the first word.

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched, this we proclaim.1 John 1:1

Heard. Seen. Looked at. Touched.

Four verbs about a body in a place. He is writing decades later, after a lifetime of telling it, and he goes right past every polished version he must have had and puts his hands back on the object.

And notice that the proclaiming comes at the end of that sentence, not the start. The telling is real and it is the point, and it stands on something older than itself.

You have that older thing. The kitchen, the light, whatever was in your hands. That stands written into your own life and His Spirit was in it, and twenty-one years of telling has not spent one minute of it.

Now let me be careful, because there is a ditch here and I am not putting you in it.

Nothing here says your telling is a lie or that you should stop. It is true, you have never embellished it, and people have come to God through it and that is not a small thing, and Scripture is not embarrassed by a well told story and His Spirit has used yours. Keep telling it. Keep the pause. The pause works.

And nothing here says a polished account is a shallow one. A smooth stone is smooth because it has been in the river a long time, and that is not a fault in the stone.

The point is only that you have not reached under it in years, and it is possible to lose access to your own afternoon while faithfully serving it to everybody else. Scripture goes under the telling, and His Spirit is the one who keeps what is under there.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is kind about it. You are afraid that if you go under there will be nothing there, and His Spirit knows exactly what is.

That the day will have gone, and the story will turn out to be all there is, and a woman who has led people to God on that account cannot afford to find that out in a car.

You are not in that danger. His word puts a man's hands back on what he saw decades later, and His Spirit is the one who keeps a real thing real, and neither of them has ever charged anybody for looking.