I Never Learned It

Ada heard her own mother come out of her mouth at twenty past two in the morning and had to sit down.

The baby is her daughter's second, seven weeks old, and had been going for the better part of an hour, and the daughter was crying by then too, in the doorway, in the way a woman does at seven weeks when it is not really about the baby.

So Ada took her and said, "Go on. Twenty minutes. Go and lie down."

And she walked the front room in the dark with that child on her shoulder, and after a while, without deciding anything, she started saying it.

The Lord bless thee and keep thee. The Lord make His face shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee.

In a particular rhythm. Three beats, then a pause, then on. Not the way anybody reads it out in a church, and not the way she would have read it herself off a page.

Her mother's rhythm.

She got to the end of it and started again, which is also what her mother did, and it was somewhere in the second time through that Ada stopped walking and stood in the middle of that front room and thought, quite clearly:

I never learned that.

She did not. Nobody sat her down. There was no memorizing, no Sunday school prize, no chart with stars on it. She has no memory whatsoever of acquiring those words.

She was under fifty years old, and she is seventy-four, and it came out of her at twenty past two in the morning in her mother's own timing, with the same pause in the same place.

She sat down in the chair with the baby, who by then had gone off, and she cried a bit, quietly, for reasons she found difficult to sort out.

Some of it was her mother, who has been gone nineteen years. Some of it was the seven week old. And some of it, she said afterward, was the plain fact that something had been in her the whole time and she had not known it was there and had never once put a hand out for it.

Now let me ask you.

Whose voice is it in, when it comes out of you?

Because something does. A line said over you at a bedside. A grace. A way of saying a psalm. Four words at the end of a phone call that your grandmother said and that you have caught yourself saying to your own children.

It was in your grandmother first

Paul writes to a young man he loves and says something about where his faith came from, and he does not make it mysterious.

For I am mindful of the sincere faith within you, which first dwelt in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice, and I am sure that it is in you as well.2 Timothy 1:5

First dwelt in your grandmother Lois. He names her. A woman nobody else in the New Testament mentions, whose entire recorded contribution is that something lived in her and then lived in her daughter and then lived in the boy.

And I am sure that it is in you as well. Paul is not guessing. He can see it in Timothy, and he can trace the line back through two women, and he says so in a letter that ended up in the Bible.

So hear this said over you, standing in the dark front room. You are carrying something that was put into you by somebody who is probably not alive to be thanked, and it did not stop with them and it has not stopped with you. That is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who keeps a thing alive in a family across three generations, which is a work nobody watches Him do.

Now let me name what actually happened in you, because it was not memorizing.

Nobody taught Ada that blessing. What happened is that a woman said it over a child, night after night, at an hour when the child was too small to be learning anything, and it went in somewhere underneath learning.

That is why it survived fifty years without being used. Things that go in that way do not decay at the rate that things you studied decay. They sit, unexamined, unused, and they come back in the exact rhythm they went in with.

And that means something for you tonight.

You are not as empty as you think you are.

That is the thing this message is actually for. You have arrived at a stretch where you cannot produce anything of your own, and you have concluded that there is nothing in there. And there is something in there, and it was put in when you were small, and you have not put a hand out for it in decades because you did not know it was there.

Scripture says the word of Christ dwells in a person richly, and dwelling is a word about living somewhere rather than visiting, and the Spirit of God is described plainly as the one who brings things to remembrance, which means the retrieving is His job and not yours.

Let me guard the two ways this goes wrong.

If nobody said anything over you as a child, this article is not a wall you are on the wrong side of. Plenty of people start the line rather than inherit it, and Lois had to be the first one too. What is in your mouth may have been put there at thirty-one, by a woman at a bus stop, and it is exactly as good.

And second: you do not have to say it well. Ada was not performing. She was walking a floor in the dark, mumbling, half asleep, in somebody else's rhythm. The words did the work and the delivery did not matter, and this whole category rests on that.

There was a man five hundred years ago who wrote a small book of prayers and blessings for householders, and he wrote in the front of it that a father should say these over his family in the morning and at night, in ordinary words, whether or not he felt anything. He was not asking for a performance. He was asking people to put something into their children that would still be there when the children were old.

That is what happened to you. Somebody did that.