Renewed In Knowledge Is A Slow Word

The album is the fat one with the loose page at the back, and it is open on the kitchen table between the teapot and a plate of something.

Her daughter is on one side and her granddaughter is on the other and they are going through it the way you do, which is out of order and with a lot of arguing about dates.

She is sixty-eight.

It started with words, about two years ago. Ordinary ones. The word for the thing you strain pasta with. The word for the middle bit of a road. And then names, which is worse, and now sometimes the name of a person who is standing in the room.

She is being investigated, which is the word they use, and everybody has been kind and nobody has said the thing.

And in the middle of the album, on a page from a holiday nobody can date, she reaches for the name of the woman standing beside her own mother in a photograph and it does not come, and she covers it well, and the conversation goes on.

What nobody at that table knows, and what she has not been able to say to a living person, is that the words and the names are not what frightens her.

What frightens her is this: if the part of me that holds words is going, then what happens to the part that knows God. Because I know Him with the same equipment. I know Him in words. And if the words go, does the knowing go with them.

If you have thought that, you know it does not arrive as theology, and you know you have never asked anybody, because there is nobody to ask.

The knowing is being renewed and it is being renewed by somebody

The weight first and whole, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it never gets shortened.

What this costs is not the words, although two years of reaching and covering is a real labor nobody sees. It is the second fear. It costs you the ordinary certainty that your faith is somewhere safe, which most people never have to think about. It costs the album, a little, because a page you cannot date is a page you are being tested on. It costs your granddaughter, who has started supplying words gently and does not know that you notice. And it costs you a question you cannot ask, because the people who could answer it would answer it too fast.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your two years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before we go on: if the fear has gone somewhere darker, as far as thinking your family would have less ahead of them without you, tell one living person today. Your doctor, your daughter, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Nothing on this page is medical advice and nothing here would ever call getting help a lack of faith. Scripture asks nobody to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who sit down on both sides of you with an album.

Now, Colossians 3, and read who is doing the verb.

And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him.Colossians 3:10

Which is renewed.

That is a passive. The new man is not renewing itself and the reader is not being told to renew anything. The renewing is being done to a person, and the last phrase names who by: after the image of him that created him.

The knowing in that sentence is not a stock you hold and can lose. It is a work being done on you by somebody else, continuously, and Paul describes it in the passive on purpose.

You are the object of that verb rather than the one responsible for it. Colossians 3:10 puts the renewing in the passive and names the Creator as the pattern, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line from a short letter and lays it on a kitchen table with an album open on it.

Now, the word knowledge, because in that letter it is not what a person can recite. Paul uses a word for knowing that is relational and recognitional rather than informational. It is the knowing of a face, not the retrieval of a fact.

And that distinction is the whole of what a woman with an album needs, because the two live in different places in a person. You can lose the name of somebody you love and still know them completely. Anybody who has sat with a person late in that road has watched it happen: the name goes, and the face is still known, and the knowing is doing something the words are not.

You have a knowing that runs on recognition rather than on retrieval. That is written into Colossians 3:10, and His Spirit in you is the one who carries a knowing that was never stored in vocabulary.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because two years of kind sentences have already been said in that kitchen.

It does not promise you your words. It says nothing about what is going to happen to your memory or your names, and I will not predict it, because what God does there is His, in His own way, and I am not going to hand a frightened woman a forecast dressed as a promise.

And it is not offered as a compensation. Nothing here says the inward renewing makes the losing acceptable or is a fair exchange for it. It is not a trade. Both things are true at once and this site is not going to sell you one for the other.

You were never the one keeping the knowing in place. Scripture puts the verb in the passive and names the one doing it, and the same Spirit who inspired it is the one carrying out the renewing while the album is open.