They Tell A Story I Was Not In

They told it again on Sunday and you were in it and you have no memory of the evening at all.

Not a vague memory. None. They named the room, the thing that happened, what somebody said, and it produced nothing in you whatsoever.

And you laughed along, which felt slightly dishonest, and then thought about it for the rest of the day.

Because it is one of about four stories this household tells, and you are in it, and you were apparently central to it, and it is entirely gone.

Here is what has been bothering you underneath that, and I want to bring it up so it can be dealt with.

It is not really about a memory. It is a question about how present you have been, and whether there is a version of your own family's history that you have somehow not attended.

I am not going to tell you that memory works oddly and to stop worrying, although both of those are true.

I am going to do something more useful, which is to point out that the story is available to you and you have never once asked for it.

What mean ye by these stones

There is an instruction in Joshua about setting up a pile of rocks, and the reason given for it is entirely about children asking questions.

That this may be a sign among you, that when your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean ye by these stones? Then ye shall answer them. (Joshua 4:6-7, King James Version)

The whole system is built on a question being asked.

The stones do nothing on their own. They sit there until a child asks about them, and then somebody tells the story, and the telling is where the thing actually happens.

You are a father who was in the room, and a night you cannot recall has never once been a night you were not part of. Joshua 4:6 makes the asking and the telling the mechanism of memory rather than anybody's private recollection, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can hand a man that instead of a worry.

And notice the direction of the asking in that passage: children to fathers.

That is the arrangement, and it is the right way round most of the time. But your household has a story you were in and cannot recall, which means for this one, the direction reverses.

You have been on the wrong side of a question, and a man asking his own children about his own evening has never once been an admission of anything. The Spirit of God is the one who lets somebody turn something around, and it is written in Joshua 4 that the memory is transmitted by asking and answering rather than by remembering alone.

And here is what the passage assumes without stating it.

Nobody in that generation is expected to hold everything personally. The whole apparatus of stones and questions exists precisely because individual memory does not carry a people's history.

You are able to be part of something you do not personally hold, and a family's memory has never once run on any one person's recollection. It is written that when your children ask, then ye shall answer them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a private burden off a man and puts it in a room.

The story is the thing, not the night

Now something that will settle the worry underneath this.

The night is gone and it is not coming back, and that is fine, because the night is not what your household has.

What they have is the story, and the story is a different object. It has been told about forty times, improved, shaped, given a better ending, and it belongs to all of you.

You have not lost anything, and a story a household tells has never once been the same object as the evening it came from. The Spirit of God is the one who names two different things a man has been treating as one, and Joshua 4:6 puts the whole weight on the telling rather than on the original event.

And you are in the story, which is the thing that actually matters.

Whatever happened on that Tuesday, the version that lives in this family has you in it, doing something, and that version is the one that will still be told in twenty years.

You are in the record permanently, and a man who cannot remember an evening has never once been a man missing from it. It is written in Joshua 4 that the stones were a sign for the generations, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts a man in a story he cannot personally recall.

And here is the practical opportunity, which is the reason to do something rather than to reflect.

They have it. All of it. Everything you cannot remember is sitting in three or four other people in your house, and it is retrievable in about eleven minutes.

You are eleven minutes from something you thought was gone, and a story held by other people has never once been out of reach of the man who was in it. The Spirit of God is the one who is present when a household tells itself something, and Scripture builds the whole memory system on somebody asking.

Ask them to tell it

Here is the instruction and it has one hard rule in it.

Ask them to tell you the story again tonight, properly, and listen to the whole of it without correcting anything.

Not as a joke. Not I still do not remember that. Ask them to tell it from the start, the way a man asks about something he is interested in.

You are able to ask for something you were part of, and a request to hear a story has never once been a smaller thing than remembering it. The Holy Spirit is the one at work in something asked for and given, and Joshua 4:6 makes the asking the beginning of the whole transaction.

And the hard rule is the correcting, so let me be specific.

Details will be wrong. The room will be the wrong room, somebody will be there who was not, and the ending will have been improved. You will feel the pull to fix at least one of them.

Fix nothing. The improved version is the family's version and it is more true than the accurate one, because it is the one that gets carried.

You have permission to let something be wrong and better, and an improved story has never once been a false one in a household. The Spirit of God is the one who works in something that grew in the telling, and it is written that the answer given to the children was a telling rather than a record.

And ask one question at the end, which is the whole payoff.

What was I doing. That is the question, and the answer to it is the thing you have been circling all week, and it is sitting in a ten year old.

You are able to find out what you were doing from the people who saw you, and one question has never once been beneath what it retrieves. It is written in Joshua 4 that the answering is where the sign does its work, and the Spirit of God is the one at work in a household telling a man about himself.