He Knows What We Are Made Of

Verna is eighty one years old and there is one thing she has never told her daughter.

She has told her daughter a great deal. They talk most days. Ruth knows about the money in nineteen seventy four and she knows about her father's temper and she knows what her mother thought of the man Ruth nearly married, because Verna is not a woman who holds much back.

But there is a thing, and it is thirty six years old now, and Ruth does not know about it, and neither does anybody else who is still living.

Verna has thought about telling her maybe four hundred times. Most often on the porch in the evening when the beans are done and the talk has gone quiet in a comfortable way. There is always a gap right there where it could go.

She has never put it in the gap.

And here is the thing that people who have not lived long enough get wrong about a silence like that.

They think it must be shame that keeps it shut. Some of it is. But most of it, for Verna, is something much plainer and harder to argue with: she has never been able to see how the explaining would go. Not the confessing. The explaining. How you got from a person who would not have done that to a person who did, in a way that another human being could follow.

She knows how it happened. She was there. She could walk you through every one of the small ordinary steps and none of them look like anything from the outside, which is exactly the problem, because told out loud in order they sound either like excuses or like nothing at all.

So the gap stays a gap, and she snaps the beans, and she loves her daughter, and thirty six years go by.

And this is where I stop writing about Verna, because there is a gap on your porch too.

Maybe it is thirty six years old and maybe it is eight months. I am not going to ask what belongs in it and I will not guess, not once, from here to the end of this page. It is yours and it stays yours.

He knows the material

I want to give you a verse that is not much quoted, and it is the plainest kindness in the whole book.

For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.Psalm 103:14

Frame. The word means the made thing, the thing formed, the way a potter would say it. God knows how we are put together because He is the one who put us together.

And then dust. Not as an insult. Read the whole psalm and you will see there is not one drop of contempt in it. It sits in the middle of a list of mercies: He forgives, He heals, He redeems, He crowns with lovingkindness, He is slow to anger. And right there in the run of it: He remembers what we are made of.

Which means the thing you have never been able to explain has never once needed explaining. Psalm 103 has Him knowing the frame He made, and the Holy Spirit has never asked one person for the sequence.

That is worth sitting still for. The reason a person cannot tell a story like that is that the other person was not there for the small ordinary steps, and told without them it sounds like an excuse. God was there for every one of the steps. He does not need the sequence, because He watched the sequence.

So take that on the porch, plainly. You are already understood, and Psalm 103:14 says He knows your frame and remembers what you are made of, and the Holy Spirit is the one making that a felt thing in you rather than a line you agree with and walk away from.

And notice the word remembereth. Not learned, not discovered, not found out. Remembers. It is something He holds on purpose and keeps in mind while He deals with you, the way a good doctor keeps your whole history in mind before saying one word about today.

Scripture is telling you what is in His mind when He looks at you, and it is not the moment. It is the material. And the Spirit of God has never once handled you as though He had forgotten it.