A Certificate I Cannot Read

It lives in the drawer under the cutlery tray, which is where important things go in that house and always has been, along with the passports and a guarantee for a boiler that was replaced in 2011.

It is a card, about the size of a postcard, and it is thicker than modern card and it has a border printed on it in a dark red that has gone slightly pink at the edges.

There is a date on it. He can read the date, because numbers survive.

Everything else is in a script he could read fluently until he was about eight and has not been able to read since he was about eleven, which is a strange sentence to write and a stranger one to live with. He knows what the shapes are. He knows the sound of the language they make. He can hear his grandmother in his mouth if he tries to sound them out, and the sounds are real and they mean nothing to him, and that is the whole experience of holding that card: a voice he can produce and cannot understand.

His parents moved when he was nine. They were the sort of practical people who decided that the new language was going to be the household language, immediately, completely, without discussion, and it was a decision made out of love and it worked. He has no accent. He went to a good school. He has done well.

And his grandmother died when he was twenty-two, and with her went the last person in that family who could have read him his own certificate out loud.

He has thought about photographing it and putting it on the internet. He has got as far as opening the camera twice.

He is forty-one. He has a daughter of eight, which is not lost on him. And every so often, usually late, he opens that drawer for something entirely different, and the card is there under the cutlery tray, and he stands with a drawer open in a dark kitchen holding a document about himself that he cannot read.

The record is not the thing

I am not going to tell you what the card says.

I could not, and neither could anybody who wanted to be honest with you, and I am not going to do the thing where I guess kindly and dress the guess up as reassurance. It is a real card and it has a real date and there are real words on it and neither of us can read them.

I also am not going to tell you whether what it records was sufficient, or complete, or the right sort. That is not a question I have any business answering about a family I have never met in a building I could not find, and a man who hands you a verdict on that from this distance is not helping you, he is performing.

What I want to do is move the record.

Because the trouble with that card is not that you cannot read it. The trouble is where you have been keeping your standing, which is in a drawer, under a cutlery tray, next to a boiler guarantee.

Here is where it actually is.

Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me.Isaiah 49:16

That is God answering a people who had just said that He had forgotten them. And He does not answer with an argument. He answers by showing them where their name is written.

Graven. Not written. Cut in. The verb is deliberate and it is permanent and it is on the part of Himself that He uses to work and to hold and, in time, to be pierced. You are engraved on the hands of God, and that is not a lovely thing I am saying to a man with a language problem, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is arriving somewhere under your ribs rather than in your general knowledge.

And notice the second half. Thy walls are continually before me. Continually. Not reviewed periodically. Not filed. In front of Him, all the time, without a gap.

Now let me say the thing about the language, because I think it is bigger than the card and I think you know that.

You lost a script at eleven. And with it, in the way these things go, you lost a certain access to your own beginning: the songs, the exact turn of phrase your grandmother used, the words on a card about yourself. That is a real loss and I am not going to minimize it by rushing to the comfort. It cost something and it went on costing.

But hear this over it. You have not lost one letter of what God has recorded about you, because He did not record it in that script or in any script, and the word says He cut it into His own hands, and the Spirit of God who is in you is the living proof that the record survived the move.

I want to say something about the two times you opened the camera.

You were about to hand a private document about yourself to strangers, and you stopped, twice. I do not think that was fear and I do not think it was pride. I think it was a man discovering, in the second before the shutter, that a translation would not actually settle the thing he needed settled.

He was right. It would not have. You are not one translation away from peace, because the peace was never held in the sentence. Scripture puts the engraving on the hands of God and the Spirit is the seal on it, and both of those were true on every day of the thirty years you could not read that card.

And here is the last of it, and it is for the man standing in a dark kitchen with a drawer open at midnight.

You are His today, and you were His at eight, and you were His at eleven when the shapes stopped making sense. The word settles it, the Spirit confirms it, and there is no version of God's record keeping in which a family's decision about a household language, made out of love, in a hurry, in a new country, put a gap in it.