It Lived In Somebody Before It Lived In You

She believes she came to this entirely on her own and she says so with a certain amount of pride.

Nobody in her family had any of it. Her father would have laughed. Her mother went to funerals and that was the whole of it. Nothing was said in that house about God from one year to the next.

So she arrived at it at thirty-four, by herself, out of nothing, and she has carried it for nineteen years as a thing she found rather than a thing she was given.

And I understand the pride and I am not going to take it off her, because coming to something with no help at all is not nothing.

But here is what I have noticed about her, sitting with her a good many times.

She has no one to be like.

When she is doing badly, there is no face she can picture who also did badly and kept going. When she does not know how to do a thing, there is nobody whose way of doing it she inherited. Everything has to be judged against an idea rather than against a person.

And an idea has no patience with you. A person did it wrong for years and carried on.

Nineteen years, and no one behind her. That is not independence. That is a woman standing in an empty field.

So let me ask you.

Who had this before you did?

He names the grandmother

Paul opens a letter to a young man he loves, and in the middle of the greeting he does something you would not expect from a letter about ministry.

He names two women.

I am reminded of your sincere faith, which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and, I am persuaded, now lives in you also.2 Timothy 1:5

Read the verb. Lived.

It is a word about dwelling, about taking up residence in a house. And Paul traces the residence backward through three people and puts the grandmother first.

2 Timothy 1 gives the faith a lineage with names attached rather than treating it as something Timothy generated, and the Spirit who moved Paul to write it put the grandmother at the head of the sentence, so the faith you carry has never once begun with the person carrying it.

Now, I am going to say something to you gently, and it is not a correction of your history.

You are right that nobody in your house handed it to you. I believe you and I am not going to invent a pious grandmother for you who did not exist.

But you have confused nobody in my family with nobody.

Somebody wrote the book you read at thirty-four. Somebody kept the building open where you first went. Somebody preserved the words you say. None of them are your relatives and every one of them is behind you.

2 Timothy 1 shows a faith arriving through people and being named as theirs before it was named as his, and the Spirit was in that handing along, which means the nineteen years you have carried as a thing you found were nineteen years of carrying something a great many people kept for you.

And notice the tenderness in it. Paul is not making a doctrinal point about succession. He is reminding a tired young man that he is somebody's grandson.

That is the whole use of it. When you are worn out, it helps enormously to be somebody's.

2 Timothy 1 puts that reminder at the front of a letter written to a man under pressure, and the Spirit chose to steady him with names, so having a person to be like has never been a luxury on top of the faith itself.