The Sentence In Pencil

Marek went up into the loft looking for a box of lightbulbs and came back down the ladder forty minutes later holding a children's Bible with a blue cover and a cracked spine.

His name was in the front in his mother's handwriting, and the date, and the name of a church, under a little printed line that said Presented To.

He sat down on the third rung from the top, because that is where you sit when you have found something, and he went through the whole book. A sticker of a lion. Half a bus ticket at Jonah. A leaf pressed flat and gone the color of tea.

And then the inside of the back cover, where he had written one sentence in pencil, in the fat careful letters of a nine year old who was concentrating hard.

Jesus is alive and he knows my name.

Marek sat there on the ladder in the dusty light out of the little window, and he tried to say it out loud, and he could not.

Not because it was untrue. He would have told you it was true. He has a shelf of books that took him twenty years to read, and he could tell you what four different traditions do with that sentence, and where each of them is strong, and exactly where each of them starts to get nervous.

That was the trouble. He could not say nine words without hearing which side he had just picked.

You know whether this is you. You start to pray and something arrives before the prayer does. A qualification. A footnote. The memory of an argument in a car park. The face of somebody who would have flinched at the way you just put it. And you have not stopped believing, and that is the strange lonely part of it. You believe it as much as you ever did, you have lost the ability to say it plainly, and the two facts have almost nothing to do with each other and you cannot make them come apart.

What you heard at the beginning

I want to say one thing before anything else, because if I do not say it now you will not be able to hear the rest of it properly.

The twenty years were not a mistake.

The books were good. The teachers were good. Learning what the words mean, and where they came from, and what the church has said about them for two thousand years, is not the thing that took the sentence out of your mouth. I am not going to stand here and tell a man who has done real work that he should have stayed nine years old. That would be a cheap message, and you have read that message before, and it did not help you. None of it is being taken off you tonight. What is written remains, and the Holy Spirit who carried John's hand across that page is not in the business of making a man smaller than he is.

Here is what John wrote to people who were being handed a great many new and impressive things.

As for you, what you heard from the beginning, let it remain in you. If what you heard from the beginning remains in you, you also will remain in the Son and in the Father.1 John 2:24

Look at the word he chose. Not go back to. Not return to. Remain. Let it stay exactly where it is, underneath, while everything else goes on top of it.

Think of a choir. When they learn a piece, they learn parts, and the parts are real work and the parts are the music. But before anybody sings a part, they all sing one note together and hold it. The parts only work because everybody came off the same note. Nobody thinks the note is better than the parts. Nobody suggests the choir should stay on the note and never learn the piece. The note is not instead of the parts. It is under them, and a choir that loses it goes sour in a way no amount of skill can fix from above.

What you wrote in pencil at nine years old was the note.

And the reason you cannot say it now is not that you outgrew it. It is that somewhere in the twenty years, saying a plain thing plainly stopped being plain. Every simple sentence turned into a position. Every position turned into a side. And nobody can pray in a sentence that has become a flag.

Paul was frightened of exactly this, and he named it in a letter to Corinth. What he feared was not that they would learn too much. He feared that the single minded, undivided thing they had toward Christ would get divided. Not lost. Divided. It is a very precise word and it describes your Tuesday nights better than anything else I could hand you.

So here is what is available to you tonight, and it is smaller and better than you think.

You do not have to unlearn anything. You do not have to burn the shelf, leave anything, join anything, or settle anything about anybody. You have to go underneath. Under the four traditions, under the arguments, under the car park, down to the note. And then say the nine words out loud, in the words you had then, without correcting the grammar, without adding the clause that makes them defensible, without the footnote getting there first.

He knew your name when you were nine. He has not since revised His position on it. That is not sentiment and it is not my line. It is what He promised in 1 John 2:24, that what you heard at the beginning remains in you, and His Spirit has kept it there underneath twenty years of everything else, without ever once asking you to say it well.