The Shirt I Wear at Christmas

There is a shirt, and it is a good shirt, and he did not buy it.

It was his father's and it fits him, which is a small family miracle everybody comments on, and Beto wears it twice a year: Christmas, and the anniversary of the day his grandmother died, when they all go and then come back and eat.

He looks right in it. Photographs of him in that shirt look like photographs of a man who belongs to those people, which he does.

And in January he was hanging it up and he thought about the other thing he does twice a year and looks right doing.

Because he believes what his family believes. All of it, in the sense that he has never disagreed with any of it and could not tell you a single point where he departs.

He goes at Christmas and at Easter and at funerals, and he knows when to stand and he knows what to say back and he says it properly, not mumbling. His aunt has told him more than once that he has his grandfather's way about him in there.

He is thirty-four and he has never chosen one thing about it.

That is the sentence that arrived while he was putting the shirt away, and it is not a rejection of anything. He is not on his way out. If you told him tomorrow that none of it was true he would be genuinely bereaved and would argue with you for an hour.

It is that everything he holds, he holds because it came in the same box as the surname and the recipes and the way they all sit down at that table in a particular order that nobody has ever explained to anyone marrying in.

He has never once, on his own, in a room, decided anything.

And there is a small fear under it that came out fully formed in January and has been there since: that a thing you never chose is a thing you would not notice losing, and that a man could go on standing at the right moments for another forty years with nothing underneath the shirt at all.

And you may know that hanger. You may have a family faith that fits you beautifully, and you may never have found out what would still be there if nobody around you held it.

The verse puts the mouth and the heart in the same sentence

Take this off before anything else, because you have carried it since January and it was never yours.

You are not disqualified by having inherited it. You never were. Scripture is entirely happy for faith to arrive through a family and never once treats an inherited belief as a lesser one, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the originality of the route in, who makes it real in a person. Set it down here at the table. It is heavy, and there is nothing shameful under it.

Now hear the sentence, and notice that it names two places and joins them.

If you declare with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.Romans 10:9

Mouth and heart, in one sentence, and they are not in competition.

The mouth is the outside of it: the standing at the right moment, the words said properly, the shirt that fits. Scripture does not sneer at the outside. It puts the declaring right there in the verse, first.

And it names a second place, and the second place is where you have never been, and His Spirit is the one who works in there.

That is the whole of what you noticed in January, and Scripture noticed it long before you did and wrote both halves down in one line so nobody would think the outside was the enemy.

You have access to the second place. Right now, at thirty-four, without changing one thing about Christmas. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who does anything at all in a heart, and He has never once refused a man because he came in through his family.

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

Nothing here says your family's faith is a costume or that the order everybody sits down in is empty. It is not. Those recipes and that table and the way your aunt says your grandfather's name are all real and God is not rolling His eyes at any of it, and a great many people have found the second place from inside exactly that kind of first place.

And nothing here is telling you to leave, to test anything, or to put your family's belief on trial to see whether it survives. That is not the exercise and it is not a good idea.

The point is only that you have never made a sentence, and a man who has never made one does not know what he would say. Scripture asks for the heart and His Spirit is the one who fills it.

Here is the tender part. Your fear is not that it is all false.

It is that you might find nothing there, and finding nothing would mean thirty-four years of standing at the right moments were a performance, and you love those people too much for that to be a survivable thought.

So you have not gone looking, and not going looking has been costing you the very thing you are afraid you do not have. Scripture puts the heart in the verse and His Spirit is the one who does the work in it, and neither of them ever asked you to audit your family first.