The Family Story That Was Not True

Everybody in that family can tell the story. It is the first thing anybody learns about them.

She has told it at every table she has ever sat at. She told it to the man she married on their third meeting. She has told it to her children so often that they now tell it, in their own words, with the same pause before the good bit that her grandmother used to make.

On a Tuesday afternoon, going through a box that had been in a loft for nineteen years, she found out that it never happened.

Not exaggerated. Not softened. It did not happen. The dates do not work, the place is wrong, and the person it was supposed to be about was somewhere else entirely, and there is paper in that box that says so plainly enough that there is no reading it any other way.

Nobody lied. That is the strange part and it is the part she cannot explain to anybody.

A thing got said once, probably kindly, probably to a child. It got repeated. It got tidied. Somewhere around the second generation it stopped being a thing somebody said and became a thing the family was, and by the time it reached her it was simply true in the way the color of the front door is true.

She has not told anybody. It has been five weeks.

Here is what she has not been able to say out loud, and she has tried twice, once to her husband and once in the car on her own.

She is not upset about the story. She is upset because she cannot find the bottom.

If that was not true, and it was load bearing, and she built forty years of understanding herself on top of it, then what else is like that, and how would she know, and what exactly is under her feet at this moment.

If something you were standing on turned out never to have been there, come and sit down on the end of that sofa. Somebody will hand you a cup and nobody is going to ask you anything.

The clause that does not depend on you

There is a short passage that runs through a series of ifs, and the last one goes somewhere the others do not.

If we be dead with him, we shall also live with him: if we suffer, we shall also reign with him: if we deny him, he also will deny us: if we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself.2 Timothy 2:11-13

Look at that fourth line, because it breaks the pattern on purpose.

Every other clause matches an action with a consequence. And then the last one arrives and refuses to. If we believe not, you expect the sentence to complete itself the way the others have. It does not. It turns and puts the weight entirely on Him.

Yet he abideth faithful. He cannot deny himself.

That is not a sentence about how well anybody is holding on. It is a sentence about what God is, and the reason given is not our grip but His nature.

You are standing on a faithfulness that does not depend on anybody having got the story right. 2 Timothy 2:13 breaks its own pattern to put the abiding on God's side and gives His own nature as the reason, and it is the Holy Spirit who preserved that clause in a letter written to somebody watching things come apart, which means the bottom you have been feeling for is not made of anything a family got wrong in the second generation.

What the story was actually doing

Now let us be fair to that story, because it is about to be treated as a fraud and it was not one.

It was doing a real job. It told a child where she came from and what her people were like, and it did that job for four decades and it did it well, and the fact that it turns out to be inaccurate does not mean the years it carried you were counterfeit. The trouble is not that it was false. The trouble is that it was carrying weight it was never built for.

You have been asking a story to do something only a foundation can do, and nothing has actually collapsed. Matthew 7:24 has a house built upon a rock that stands when the rain and the floods and the winds come, and it is written of the one who hears His sayings and does them rather than of the one who has the family history straight, and it is the same Spirit who fastens a person to Christ, so the rain in that loft found out what your house is on and the answer was not the story.

The real question, and it is a better one than it feels

Here is what has been keeping you awake, said plainly.

If that was not true, what else is like that, and how would you know?

That question feels like the floor giving way. It is actually the first honest look you have ever had at your own footing, and honest looks are not disasters.

You were never held up by the accuracy of what you had been told, and finding that out is a gain rather than a loss. Psalm 139:1 says O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me, and it is written in the completed past by somebody who found being fully known a comfort rather than a threat, and it is the Holy Spirit who searches the deep things, which means there is nothing left in that loft, or in any loft, that can tell you something about yourself He did not already have.