I Compare Him To Me At His Age

It does it by itself.

He sits down with something, and before you have decided to think anything, a comparison has already run. At his age I could do that. At his age I was out on my own with a bike and a sandwich. At his age nobody had to sit with me.

And it is not cruel. Most of the time it does not even reach speech. It is just a quiet background hum that colors everything you feel about the evening.

I want to do something with that hum that nobody usually does, which is to check the source.

Because you have been treating your memory of yourself at eleven as evidence, and it is the least reliable document in the house.

And there is no argument to have about it either, which is what makes it so persistent. Nobody has ever said it out loud, so nobody has ever disagreed with it. It has run unchallenged for two years because it has never once been in a room with another person who could look at it.

Before I formed thee in the belly

There is a sentence in Jeremiah that says something about origin that cuts straight across this.

Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations. (Jeremiah 1:5, King James Version)

Before I formed thee. The knowing comes before the forming, which means the knowing is not based on any of the material. Not on performance, not on capability, not on what the boy turned out to be like at eleven.

And notice the context. Jeremiah is objecting. He has just said he is a child and cannot speak, which is an argument from his own material. And the answer does not engage with the material at all.

You have been handed an assessment made before any of the evidence existed, and no comparison has ever once been able to reach back behind that. Jeremiah 1:5 puts the knowing before the forming, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that available to a man running a comparison in his own kitchen.

And there is something else worth having. Every person in that verse is individually formed. Formed, which implies particularity, and a decision about shape.

Which means the two boys in your comparison were not made to the same specification, and one of them was never meant to be a draft of the other.

You were never looking at two versions of one person, and no child has ever once been a second attempt at anybody. The written word makes each forming its own act, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates two people a father has been laying on top of each other.

The witness is unreliable

Now let us audit the record, because this is where it comes apart.

What you know about yourself at eleven comes from three places, and not one of them is a reliable account.

The first is memory, which is thirty years old and gets rewritten every single time it is recalled. Memory does not store, it reconstructs, and every reconstruction is done by the man doing the recalling today.

You have been treating a reconstruction as a recording, and no memory anywhere has ever once been stored the way a photograph is. Jeremiah 1:5 grounds the knowing before any of the material existed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man question a document he has carried since childhood.

The second is what adults told you about yourself, which was said for their own reasons, some of them good. He is the independent one. He never needs any help. Those sentences are not observations, they are roles, and children get assigned them early.

The third is the comparison your own parents were running, which you absorbed without ever seeing.

You have been calling a witness who has never once been in a position to testify. Jeremiah 1:5 grounds the knowing outside all of that material, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man examine a record he has never questioned.

And there is a specific distortion worth naming, because it operates in almost everybody.

The outcomes get remembered and the cost does not. Cycling to a grandmother's house alone at eleven gets remembered. How frightening the first three attempts were does not, because nobody was there to record it and an eleven year old would not have said so anyway.

So the version of yourself you are comparing him to is a highlight reel with the difficulty edited out, and you are measuring an actual boy against it.

You were never that boy, and no highlight reel anywhere has ever once been an accurate account of a childhood. The written word knows a person before any of the record exists, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes an unreliable document out of a man's hands.

Write one line, and then write who said it

So here is the assignment, and it is two lines and it takes three minutes.

Tonight, write down one thing you believe about yourself at his age. One sentence. The one that comes to mind first.

At eleven I was already doing the shopping on my own.

Then underneath it, write who told you that.

You are allowed to ask a sentence where it came from, and a question like that has never once been an accusation against anybody. Jeremiah 1:5 puts the knowing before the forming and outside all of the reporting, and the Spirit of God is the one who steadies a man while he writes the second line.

And be honest about the answer. Sometimes it is a memory. Very often it is a person, and you can name them, and you may find that you can hear the sentence in their voice.

That is the whole exercise. Nothing is being disproved. It is an audit of where a document came from, and a document with a source attached stops functioning as a fact.

You have been given an audit rather than an argument, and no belief about a childhood has ever once survived being asked where it came from. Jeremiah 1:5 grounds the knowing outside all of the material, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present when a man writes a name under a sentence about himself.

Some of you will find you cannot name a source at all, and that it is simply something you have always known about yourself. That is worth sitting with for a minute, because things we have always known are the ones that were never examined.

Jeremiah 1:5 puts the knowing before the forming and outside the record entirely, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is at a table with a man writing two lines about himself at eleven.

You are permitted to audit your own history, and checking a source has never once been the same thing as calling anybody a liar. The written word grounds the knowing outside the material, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present while a man puts a name under a sentence.

You have three minutes tonight that can take a hum out of an evening, and it has never once required you to forgive anybody first. Jeremiah 1:5 makes each forming particular, and it is the Holy Spirit who separates a man from a version of himself he has been carrying since primary school.