The Photographs That Belong to a Stranger

There are nine albums and they are on the floor in a half circle around her, because the shelf they lived on for thirty years went to the dump last Saturday with the rest of the front room.

Her aunt is on the couch with a mug going cold, narrating. Her aunt is wonderful. Her aunt has been doing this for eighteen years without ever once making it feel like a chore.

Oh, that is the beach at Ocean City. You had that red bucket for years, you would not let anyone else touch it, you took it to bed one night and your mother let you.

She looks at the picture. A girl, maybe five, squinting into the sun with a red bucket held against her stomach with both arms, sand on her knees, mouth open in the middle of saying something.

She has no idea who that is.

She knows the facts. She could pass a test on them. She knows about the bucket and the cat named Bishop and the year she broke her wrist on a trampoline and the fact that she sang in a school play at nine and cried afterward because of something a boy said. She has been told all of it, carefully, by people who love her, and she has the whole thing filed the way you file a country you have read about and never been to.

She was fourteen. Two cars, a wet road, four seconds. Her body healed almost completely. What did not come back was everything before it, and after eighteen years and a great many appointments, everybody involved has stopped using the word yet.

So the albums on the floor are pictures of a stranger. That is not a figure of speech and she has stopped apologizing for saying it. There is a girl in these photographs who had a red bucket and a cat and a favorite dress, and every single person in this room knows her better than the woman she grew into.

Her aunt turns the page and says, oh, look at your face here, you were furious.

And she says, in the voice she has used for eighteen years, warm and easy and entirely hollow: I was, wasn't I.

She has built a whole personality out of nodding along to her own life.

You have your own albums. Maybe it is a head injury and maybe it is illness, an anesthetic that took a year, an early childhood that will not come up no matter who asks, a whole stretch of a life other people can describe to you in detail while you sit there hearing about a stranger. And you have learned to nod, because correcting people is exhausting and it makes the room sad. You are known, completely, by Someone who was actually there. It is written in Psalm 139:1 that the Lord has searched you and known you, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept that knowledge whole and unbroken across the exact four seconds where yours stops.

Where your continuity has actually been kept

Psalm 139 opens with a sentence that most people read as comfort and almost nobody reads as architecture.

O LORD, you have searched me and known me!Psalm 139:1

Read what kind of verb that is. Searched. Known. Not observed, not recorded, not archived. It is the language of somebody who went through a life the way you go through a house, room by room, and came out the other side holding all of it.

And then the psalm keeps going, and it goes to the exact place you live. He knows the sitting down and the rising up. He discerns thoughts from far off. He was there before there was a person to be there for: your unformed substance, and in His book were written the days that were formed for you when as yet there was none of them (Psalm 139:16). The days were written down before you had one memory to store them in.

So here is the architecture, and I want you to have it plainly. Your continuity has never been held in your recall. Not yours and not anybody else's. Everyone in that living room is running on a version of their childhood that has been rewritten a dozen times by retelling, and every one of them believes it is a recording. Memory was never the place a person is kept.

You are kept somewhere else. You always were.

You are one person to Him, unbroken, from the sand on those knees to the woman on this floor. That is Psalm 139:1 and not a comforting way of looking at it, and it is the Holy Spirit who holds the two halves of you as one continuous thing across a gap that no amount of therapy has closed.

Restored is not the same word as replaced, and this is where sites lie

I am going to be very direct with you now, because this category is where writing like this usually cheats.

The memories are gone. I am not going to tell you they are coming back, I am not going to hint at it with a sentence that sounds hopeful and means nothing, and I am not going to leave a door open at the end of this article so you spend the rest of the week listening for a knock. If somebody has been telling you that God is about to give you your childhood back, they do not know that, and neither do I, and building a life on the maybe of it has already cost you enough.

Restored is not replaced. Replaced would hand you the beach and the bucket and the girl's own view of them. Restored puts back into the person what was taken out of the person, and Peter says exactly who does it and to whom: the God of all grace will Himself restore, confirm, strengthen and establish you (1 Peter 5:10). You. Not your hippocampus. Not the albums.

And whole is not the same word as complete, either. Whole is not a container with nothing missing. Whole is a person who is one thing rather than two, integrated rather than partitioned, at home in the life they are actually living. A person can be whole with a gap in them. That is not a consolation, it is a definition, and it is the only definition this site is willing to use.

You are being made whole in the life you actually have, not in the one the albums show. His word says God Himself restores the person in 1 Peter 5:10, and it is the Holy Spirit doing that work at His own speed, in a woman on a floor at thirty two, with nine albums open around her and nothing coming back.