I Went In For My Family

His mother sat in the second row in a green dress that she had bought for it, and that is not a guess, because she told the whole neighborhood she had bought it for it.

He was twenty-six.

There had been about a year of a particular kind of pressure, which was not shouting and was not ultimatums and would not look like pressure to anybody outside that family. It was his aunt saying "and when are we going to see you do the thing" at a birthday. It was his mother, twice, going quiet in a way that is louder than talking. It was a cousin, who meant well, saying "it would mean everything to her, man."

And it is not that he did not believe. He did. He does. He had prayed on his own in his own room since he was nineteen and nobody in that family knew about half of it.

But when he walked to the front of that room on a Sunday morning in June, and when the water went over him, what he was aware of, above everything, was the second row.

He looked for her face. That is the specific thing. In the half second before he went under he looked for his mother's face, and he found it, and she had both hands pressed together in front of her mouth, and that is the image he has carried for nineteen years.

Not the water. Her face.

He is forty-five now. He has three children and a household where prayer is normal and a wife who came to faith after him and partly because of him. He is not a man on the outside of anything.

But there is an audit that runs in him, and it has run since about two weeks after that June, and it goes: how much of that was God and how much of it was her green dress?

And under it, quieter and worse: if it was for her, is it real?

His mother died four years ago. And the audit did not stop when she did. If anything it got worse, because now there is nobody to be doing it for, and the question can be asked without any noise around it.

Nobody is qualified to run that audit

I want to name the audit accurately before I say anything about it, because I think you have been calling it honesty.

You have been trying to weigh two motives against each other, nineteen years after the fact, using the only instrument available, which is your own memory of your own interior at twenty-six.

That is not honesty. It is an impossible task that has been dressed up as a virtue, and you have been failing it every few months for nineteen years, and the failing has never once produced anything except the feeling of being slightly fraudulent at your own table.

So let me put something else in your hands.

These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life.1 John 5:13

Read the purpose clause. That ye may know. John says plainly why he wrote the letter: so that people who believe would have the knowing, in writing, from outside themselves.

He does not say so that you may examine your motives and reach a confident finding. He says he has written it down, so that the knowing rests on a document rather than on an audit.

You have eternal life and you are meant to know it, and the knowing is offered as something written to you rather than something you generate by introspection, and that is not my reassurance, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is arriving in the auditing place rather than the reading place.

Now let me say something about your mother's face, because I am not going to let it be the villain of this page.

You looked for her in the half second before you went under. Of course you did. She was the person who had prayed for you longest and wanted this most, and a man looks for the face of the person who has wanted a thing for him. That is not contamination. That is love, doing what love does, in the fraction of a second available.

You are not less His because you looked at her, and the word says the knowing was written down for people who believe on the name of the Son of God, and you did and you do, and the Spirit of God has been in you since well before that June, since a room at nineteen that nobody in that family knew about.

I want to touch the year of pressure too, since we are being honest.

There was pressure. It was real, and it was gentle, and it was pressure, and I am not going to pretend an aunt at a birthday and a mother going quiet are nothing. Families do this and they do it out of love and it still weighs.

But mixed motives are the ordinary condition of every human being who has ever walked to the front of any room. You have never once done anything from a single pure motive and neither has anybody else, and Scripture does not make purity of motive the mechanism of eternal life, and the Spirit is the seal on a man rather than a certificate awarded to a clean intention.

And here is the last of it, and it is for the man whose mother is four years gone.

You are not left holding an unanswerable question. You are holding a written document, addressed to people who believe, whose stated purpose is that they would know. The audit can close. Not because you passed it. Because it was never the court with jurisdiction. The Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you praying out loud at your own table, which is not what God does with a man He is still assessing.