The Photograph From Before The Van

There are nine pictures up the stairs and one on the wall in the hall at the bottom, and it is the one at the bottom that he stops at.

It is not a good photograph. Somebody's thumb is in the corner of it and the light is wrong and he is laughing at something out of frame with his head half turned, standing on a beach in a coat, holding a paper bag of something.

The year is on the back in his wife's handwriting.

It is the year before.

He is fifty-one now. Two and a half years since the van came out of the junction. Everyone has been extraordinary. The physical therapists were extraordinary. His brother drove four hundred miles twice. The insurance took eleven months and got sorted in the end and nobody in this family talks about it any more, because the talking part is finished and the living part is the part that is left.

And every evening, going through the hall to lock the back door, he stops at that picture for about two seconds. Not sentimentally. He would be embarrassed if anybody caught him doing it.

What he is doing is checking. Because somewhere in the last two years he decided a thing he has never said, which is that the man in that photograph on the beach with the paper bag was the real one, and everything since is a version of him that is being managed.

If you have a picture like that on a wall, you know exactly how long you stand in front of it, and you know nobody has ever asked you why.

He was looking at you before there was anything to look at

The weight, first and fully, because on this site nothing about God gets said until the true thing has been said at its real size.

What this costs is not the body, or not only. It costs the man on the beach. It costs the certainty that the person doing things is you and the person being helped is somebody else. It cost you two and a half years of being the subject of everybody's kindness, which is a debt nobody sends a bill for and which you feel anyway. It costs the ordinary confidence of being the one who drives, the one who carries it in, the one who is asked. And it costs you two seconds every evening in a hall, checking a photograph, which you have never mentioned to your wife.

I am not calling any of that small. I am not putting it beside anybody else's either, because there is no ranking on this site and there is not going to be. Any word from God that needs your two and a half years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, because it belongs early: if standing in that hall has taken you further than tired, as far as thinking the household would have less to carry without you in it, tell one living person today. Your doctor, your brother who drove four hundred miles, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks no man to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who get in a car.

Now, Jeremiah. A young man being handed a job he did not want, who tries to get out of it by saying he is not up to it.

Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee.Jeremiah 1:5

Read the ordering, because in Hebrew as in English the order carries the argument.

Before I formed thee. That is prior to the body existing at all. Not before the accident. Not before the good years, not before the beach, not before the coat. Before there was tissue.

I knew thee. Not knew about. The verb there is the one Scripture uses for the deepest kind of knowing there is, the knowing that involves relationship rather than data.

You were known before there was any version of you to compare against another one. Jeremiah 1:5 puts the knowing prior to the forming, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence spoken to a frightened young man and sets it down in a hallway at eleven at night.

Now sit with what that does to the photograph. If God knew you before He formed you, then the man on the beach was already a later edition. He was not the original either. He was a stage, exactly as the man in the hall is a stage, and neither of them is the reference copy, because the reference copy is not a stage at all, it is a knowing held in the mind of God before anything was made.

You have never once been compared to your own earlier photograph by the God who knew you before either version existed. That is written into Jeremiah 1:5, and His Spirit in you is the guarantee that the knowing is present tense and not archival.

Then the second verb, and this is the one nobody preaches on for somebody in a hallway. I sanctified thee. Set apart. Marked out for a purpose, before birth, before capacity, before any demonstration of anything.

Jeremiah's whole objection was capacity. I cannot speak, I am a child. And God does not argue with the assessment. He does not tell the young man he is more capable than he thinks. He changes the subject entirely, back to what He did before Jeremiah had a body to be inadequate with.

Now, precisely, what this does not say, because two and a half years of well meant sentences have already been handed over in corridors.

It says nothing about your recovery. Nothing about the man on the beach coming back, nothing about next year, nothing about what your body does or stops doing. I will not predict it. What God does there is His, in His own way, and a man who talks confidently about somebody else's next two years is talking to hear himself.

What it settles is which version is the original. And the answer is neither of the ones on your wall.

You are the one He knew, and He knew you before the beach and He knows you in the hall. Scripture puts the knowing before the forming, and the same Spirit who was given to you is the seal on a knowledge that does not run on photographs.