The River Was Cold And I Was Fourteen

Fourteen, and April, and a river that came down off the mountain, and the whole of what he remembers about that morning is how cold the water was.

That is not a figure of speech. He has tried. He has sat down and deliberately tried to get anything else out of it, the way you dig in a drawer for a receipt you are fairly sure you kept, and what comes up every time is the same three things.

The cold, going up his legs like a wire.

The stones, which were round and unstable and made everybody walk like an old man.

And a bird. There was a bird making a repeated noise in a tree on the far bank and he was listening to it, and he has never been able to work out what kind, and he has spent an unreasonable amount of his adult life half wondering about that bird.

That is it. That is the whole recording.

He does not remember the words that were said over him. He does not remember going under. He does not remember coming up, which seems impossible and is nevertheless true. There is a photograph somewhere of about forty people on a bank in coats and he is a pale smear in the middle of it.

He remembers the truck afterwards, a bit. He remembers somebody's grandmother had brought a flask of coffee for the adults and gave him a cup of it as a joke because he was shaking, and it was the first coffee he ever drank and it was terrible.

He is fifty-two now. And the shape of the thing he carries is not doubt exactly. It is closer to embarrassment. Because when other men in that county talk about theirs, and they do, they talk about what they felt and what was said and how the sky was, and he has a bird and a wire of cold going up his legs.

He has never once said, out loud, to anyone, that he cannot actually remember it.

He has nodded a lot. He has said "That is right" a good many times to descriptions of an experience he does not have. And every one of those nods has put another small stone in the same place, and after thirty-eight years there is a fair amount of gravel in there.

The record was never yours to keep

I am going to say something at the top of this and then I am going to lean on it the whole way through.

Your memory is not the record.

That morning happened. Forty people in coats were there. A river ran and a bird made a noise in a tree, and a boy of fourteen went down the stones on unsteady legs, and none of that becomes less real because the boy was too cold to file it properly.

And I am not going to tell you whether it counted. That is not my sentence to write about a river in April in a county I have never been to. What I am going to do is take your memory off the witness stand, because it has been standing there for thirty-eight years, being asked questions it was never able to answer, and it is tired.

Here is what actually holds it.

Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.Psalm 139:16

Stop on the phrase in thy book. God keeps a book. That is the claim. And the thing written in it there is not the man's own account of himself, it is what God saw, and He was seeing and recording before there was anything of the man to see.

You are written in a book you have never read and did not write, and that is not a comfort I am offering a man with a poor memory, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing in your chest instead of being received as an interesting verse.

And look at the tense of what God was doing. He was watching, and writing, at a stage where the man had no capacity to notice anything at all. If God's record keeping required the subject to be paying attention, that verse could not exist.

Now let me talk about the nodding, because I think that is the actual wound and the river is only where it started.

Thirty-eight years of agreeing with descriptions of an experience you do not have is a long time to spend slightly outside your own conversation. And I want to say clearly: that was not dishonesty. It was a man not wanting to derail somebody else's good moment with an admission that would take twenty minutes to explain.

But it has cost you. You have been carrying a thing you have never been able to say out loud, and it has been quietly getting heavier since April. The word of God says He remembers what we are made of, and the Spirit of God who has been with you through every one of those nods is not the one who has been adding the gravel.

I want to say something about the cold, too, because I think you have treated it as a failure.

You were fourteen and in a mountain river in April. Your body did exactly what a body is built to do: it stopped attending to anything except heat, because that is what keeps a boy alive. That is not spiritual dullness. That is design.

You were not absent that morning. Your attention was. And Scripture puts your standing in God's book rather than in your attention, and the Spirit is the seal on it, and there is nothing in the whole of the written word that makes a boy's ability to concentrate at ten degrees the hinge of anything.

And here is the last of it, and this is the one for the man in the truck with the terrible coffee. You have been His for thirty-eight years while believing you could not produce the paperwork. The paperwork was never in your hands. He wrote it down Himself, before there was any of you to write about, and He has not misplaced it.