A Country I Left At Four

She remembers three things and she has never been sure that any of them are hers.

A yellow wall with a crack in it in the shape of a river.

The noise of a particular kind of bird at a particular time of day, which she heard once in a documentary at thirty-one and had to leave the room.

And being carried up steps by somebody whose shirt smelled of cigarettes and cologne, and the specific angle of the world from that height.

That is it. She was four.

The rest is other people's sentences. There was a church with a green door. There was a priest, or a pastor, the family used both words at different times and she has never known if that was carelessness or something else. There was a white dress that a great aunt made and that was later cut up for something else because that is what you did.

She has one photograph and it is not of the day. It is of a room with people in it who are laughing at something, and she is in it, small, at the edge of a table, and her mother has always said "that was that week" and left it there.

The family came here in a hurry for reasons nobody explains to a four-year-old and did not explain to her at fourteen either.

Her mother stopped speaking the language at home within two years. Her father kept it for a while and then stopped too, and by the time she was ten it was a language that happened on the telephone at Christmas and nowhere else. She understands it now the way you understand music. She can feel the shape of a sentence and not the words.

She is forty-seven.

She has been back once, at twenty-nine, on a trip that she has never fully talked about, and she could not find the church with the green door. She had three days and no name for it, and the town had changed the way towns change, and she stood in a square with a coffee and understood that she was looking for a building using instructions from a four-year-old.

And what she carries is not doubt about God. It is a sense of being disconnected from her own beginning. As though the file starts on page nine, and pages one to eight are in a building in a country in a language, and she is here.

There is no gap in the line

I want to start where you are, which is a square with a coffee, holding instructions from a four-year-old.

That trip was not a failure. I want to say that before anything else, because I suspect you have filed it as one, and you have not fully talked about it in eighteen years, and unspoken things get heavier rather than lighter.

You went. At twenty-nine, on your own, to a country you left in a hurry, and you walked a town for three days looking for a green door. That is not the behavior of somebody who does not care about their own beginning. That is somebody who cares enormously and had almost nothing to go on.

Now here is what I want to put underneath the disconnection.

If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.Psalm 139:9 and 10

Look at what David is doing. He is trying to construct a place where God would not be. He goes as far as language allows: the wings of the morning, the far side of the sea, the limit of anywhere. And every time he arrives, God is already the one leading and holding.

Even there. That is the phrase. It is the phrase for people whose lives have a there in them.

You are led by the same hand in this country that led you in that one, and there is no seam in it, and that is not a comfort I am handing a woman with an interrupted childhood, it is the written word, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is going into the disconnected place rather than into your general sense of things.

Now let me say something about the language, because I think it is the real subject and the green door is the picture of it.

You lost a language between four and ten, not by choosing to, and with it went the ability to hold your own beginning in the words it happened in. You understand it now like music. You feel the shape of a sentence and not the words, and that is one of the more painful descriptions of a thing I have heard in a while.

You have not lost one page of what God has recorded about you, because His record was never in that language or in this one. Scripture says His hand was leading and holding in the uttermost parts, and the Spirit of God who is in you now was in a house with a yellow wall with a crack in it shaped like a river.

I want to touch the three memories, too.

You have never been sure they are yours. That is a genuinely disorienting thing to live with: to hold three images and not know whether you remember them or have constructed them out of somebody else's sentences.

I cannot settle that for you and I am not going to pretend to. But hear this over the top of it. You are not required to authenticate your own memories in order to be His. The word puts the leading and the holding in God's hand from the first place to the last, and the Spirit is the seal on it, and a crack in a yellow wall is not load-bearing.

And here is the last, and it is for the woman standing in a square.

You have been treating your beginning as though it is somewhere else, and it is not. It is not in a building with a green door and it is not on pages one to eight of a file in another country. God does not keep His records in the places that people leave in a hurry. The word says even there His hand led, which means the there and the here are one continuous piece of ground, and the Spirit in you is the same Spirit who was over that house.