The Same Fire in Your Own Room

Your grandmother prays out loud in the car.

Not quietly, either. Out loud, in the ordinary voice she uses for the shopping, in traffic, with the indicator going. She drops half a tone when she says Lord, which she has done for as long as you can remember, and you would know that half tone anywhere on earth.

She prays for parking spaces. She gets them. This is statistically annoying and you have stopped mentioning it.

Her Bible has gone soft at the cover the way a school bag goes soft, and there is a rubber band round the middle holding in about nine things that are not part of the Bible: a hospital appointment card from a long time ago, a photograph with somebody's ear cut off, a shopping list, a folded bit of paper with three names on it that she has never explained to anybody. She calls you by your cousin's name and then by the dog's name and then, eventually, correctly, and she does not consider this a problem.

And she has a tin. Everyone's grandmother has a tin. Nobody knows what is in the tin.

Here is the part you have never told anybody.

You know the words to songs you never learned. You were at hers, at the sink, with your sleeves pushed up, and you got to the end of the second verse of something written about a hundred and thirty years ago before you noticed you were singing at all. Nobody taught you that on purpose. It came in through the walls, along with the way you say grace when you are tired and the exact tone you use when somebody in your family is ill, which is not your tone. It is hers.

You say the same things she says. When you pray on your own, which you do more often than the people at school would guess, you can hear her cadence in it. Sometimes you can hear an entire sentence of hers come out of your mouth, and it is a strange feeling, like catching sight of your own hands and thinking they look like somebody else's.

So there is a question, and it sits with you, and it does not sit with you at the front of an evening meeting, it sits with you at about eleven at night with the lamp still on.

Is this actually mine, or did I just grow up next to somebody who has it?

Nobody in your family has asked you that. Some of them would be hurt by the question and you know exactly which ones. And you would never say it in a group, because saying it out loud sounds like the first line of somebody quietly leaving, and you are not leaving. That is the whole strange thing about it. You are not on your way out. You are on your way in, and you cannot tell whether the thing you are walking into is yours or hers.

That question is not a crack in you. Stay with me, because I want to put something under it.

Nobody calls a language second hand

Start with the plainest thing I know, and it has nothing religious in it at all.

You did not choose your first language. Somebody older than you talked at you for two years while you lay there being no use to anybody, and the words went in, and now you think in them. Every joke you ever made, every argument you ever won, every honest sentence said to somebody at two in the morning came out in a language handed over by people who never asked permission.

And nobody has ever once called that second hand. Nobody has ever suggested that your words belong to your mother because she taught them to you. They are yours. You use them to say things she would never say. You use them, sometimes, to disagree with her.

That is how inheritance works with anything living. It is not a coat handed down, which stays somebody else's coat however long it is worn. It is more like fire. In the mountains, when a family moved down the road to a new place, somebody carried coals from the old stove in a covered pan and laid the new fire with them. The fire in the new house was the same fire. It was also entirely, actually, that house's fire, and it warmed that house, and it burned that house's wood, and nobody in the valley stood in the doorway and said, this heat is really your mother's heat.

Now watch what happens when a man in the Bible has exactly your problem.

When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also.2 Timothy 1:5

Read that slowly, because it is one of the kindest sentences in the whole of Scripture and almost nobody notices it.

Paul is writing to a young man. He names the grandmother first. He names her out loud, on the record, with respect, in a letter that has been read for two thousand years, and he says the faith dwelt in her first. He does not tiptoe around the fact that Timothy's faith arrived through his family. He puts it in writing.

And then, in the same breath, without an if in it anywhere: and I am persuaded that in thee also.

You are not a guest at your grandmother's faith. 2 Timothy 1:5 says the same unfeigned faith dwelt in her and dwells in him, one word for both of them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the dwelling, in her front room and in your bedroom at eleven at night.

Notice what Paul does not say. He does not say Timothy has a promising start. He does not say he will find out for himself in a few years. He does not put the young man on probation and check back at the end of the season. He calls it unfeigned, which means unfaked, and he says it is in him, present tense, while the young man is still young enough for people to look at him and think about it.

You have the same faith she has, and the same is not the same as borrowed. The written word calls it one faith, one Lord, one baptism, and the Holy Spirit does not keep a smaller version in stock for the people who came in through their family.

The question is not the crack in it

Now the eleven o'clock question, because I promised to put something under it.

The reason it feels dangerous is that it feels like doubt, and somewhere along the way you picked up the idea that doubt is the opposite of faith and that a real believer would not be lying there wondering. That idea is very common and it is not in the Bible.

Here is what your question actually is. It is the sound of something moving out of the family's hands into yours. A person who owns nothing never asks whether it is theirs. Nobody in your school lies awake wondering whether they really believe in the sea. You ask that question about the thing you are holding, and you ask it because you have started holding it.

You are not too young for any of this to be real. Scripture says let no one despise your youth, which is written to a young man doing serious work, and the Holy Spirit is not on a waiting list until you are twenty five.

I want to be careful with something here, and it matters.

Your grandmother is not a scaffold that comes down when the building is finished. There is a version of growing up that treats everything you were given as training wheels to be discarded to prove the bike is yours, and it is a cheap way to live and it is not what is happening to you. The faith is hers and it is yours at the same time, in the same room, for the rest of both your lives. What changes is not whose it is. What changes is that you start doing things with it that she never did, in places she has never been, with people she will never meet.

You have been handed something to spend, not something to keep in a drawer. The written word says stir up the gift of God that is in you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ordinary Tuesday the place that gets stirred up.