I Tell Everybody Else's Stories

Ask him anything about anybody and he has it.

He can tell you what happened to his grandmother on the road out of that town, and the exact words she said afterwards, and which of her sisters did not believe her for eleven years.

He can tell you about the neighbor two doors down who had that winter, and what came of it, and what the man said at the door in the spring.

He can tell you about a stranger on a train, a stranger, whose whole account he heard once in about forty minutes and has been able to repeat for nineteen years, including the bit about the coat.

He is the one people ring when they cannot remember a name.

And tonight the table is full and the lamps are on and one of the younger ones, who is not being clever and does not know what she is doing, says: what about you though. What has God ever done for you.

And there is a pause that goes on slightly too long, and he does the thing he has always done without knowing he does it, which is to say, ah, and reach for somebody else's.

She lets him. She is not going to press him in front of everybody.

But he is aware, pouring the tea, that he has never once in his life told one of these about himself. Not to his children. Not to his wife.

And he is not sure whether that is modesty or something he should be worried about.

And you know that, because you can tell somebody else's story better than you can tell your own.

The one you have never told

Let us settle what governs this whole page. Nothing on it is being asked of you, there is no appeal at the bottom, and nobody here is going to write your account for you.

You are looking at an invitation, and the One being tested inside it is God. Follow the verb in the famous sentence and it lands on Him. He is under examination. He is the one who offered to be found out. It is written, put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts (Malachi 3:10), and the Holy Spirit is the One who lets a reader hear that verb land where it actually lands.

Here it is, in its own room:

Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.Malachi 3:10

Said to a nation, in one decade, about one building, where the store room had emptied and the families who worked there had gone home hungry. It is a sentence about people eating, and it was never a lever.

And here is what belongs to this page.

God had already been faithful to those people for centuries before He ever invited them to test Him, and He was already faithful to you long before anybody at your table asked. That invitation comes at the end of a very long book, spoken to a people whose entire history is a record of what He had already done. The test was never the start of His faithfulness. It was an invitation to notice what was already there. It is the Holy Spirit, and not this page, who takes that off a page and sets it down under a fig tree.

Now the pause at the table, and it deserves a proper answer rather than a compliment about your humility.

There is nothing wrong with carrying other people's accounts. It is a real work and a rare one, and a family without somebody doing it forgets itself inside two generations. Nobody here is going to suggest you stop.

But the not telling your own is not the same thing as modesty, and you already suspect that or you would not have noticed the pause.

Forgetting your own is the ordinary condition of a person, and God has never been surprised by it. It is written, bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits (Psalm 103:2). Notice who that sentence is addressed to. It is a man talking to himself, out loud, because he could not rely on himself to remember without being told. It is written, I will remember the deeds of the Lord (Psalm 77:11), which is a decision made in a bad night by somebody who had to make it deliberately.

And here is the passage for a man who has never gone first.

He asked them. When I sent you out with no purse, He said, did you lack anything? And they said, nothing (Luke 22:35).

Those men had been telling stories about Him for three years. Ask them about a blind man in Jericho and they would have gone all night. But the account of what had happened to them, personally, on their own roads, with their own empty purses, had to be pulled out of them with a direct question, and even then the answer is one word.

You are not being asked to perform, you are being asked to go and look, and those are two entirely different things. It is written that you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you (Deuteronomy 8:2), and the sentence is addressed to each person about their own way, not about the nation's. His Spirit is the one who makes that a walk you take yourself rather than a story you tell about somebody.

Now the guardrails, and they are the reason this page hands you less than you might expect.

Nobody here is going to name your three. If this article suggested them, you would have three of somebody else's again, and that is precisely the problem you came in with.

And nobody here is going to turn them into a pattern. When you have them, they will not predict anything, they will not be a system, and they do not add up to a forecast about the years you have left. They are three things that happened to you, and that is enough. It is the Holy Spirit, not this page, who carries a sentence like that out of its own century and sets it down where you are standing.

God proved Himself to you long before anybody at your table thought to ask, and the finding out is looking rather than earning. It is written that He is the same yesterday and today and forever (Hebrews 13:8), so what you find will not be a coincidence. It is the same Person who has been in every story you have ever told about anybody else. The Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line spoken in one decade and makes it live in an ordinary room today.