The Photograph Nobody Reprinted

There used to be a photograph on the wall of the hallway at Beto's mother's house and there is now a small unfaded rectangle where it was.

Nobody said anything about it. It was there in April and it was not there in June, and in between, the thing happened.

That hallway has nineteen photographs in it. There is a wedding from nineteen sixty two. There is a boy in a first communion suit who is now a fifty year old man with a bad knee. There is a whole wall of a family that has never thrown a single picture away in sixty years, and there is one rectangle, slightly lighter than the wall around it, at eye height, on the left.

He noticed it the first time he came back. He has never mentioned it and neither has anybody else.

Here is what he cannot work out, and it is worse than the rectangle.

He does not know whether it means what he thinks it means.

It might have been taken down because it was the picture from that day and it hurt his mother to walk past it. It might have been taken down for somebody else's sake entirely. It might have got knocked and broken and never got reframed, because that has happened twice before in that hallway and nobody made anything of it.

And he will never ask. So he walks past a rectangle four times a Sunday and reads a verdict into it that may not be there.

Now the part that this message will not skip.

His family did not do this to him. They lost something too. There are people around that table who had to explain it at work, who took phone calls they should not have had to take, who defend him now in rooms he is not in and then come home tired from it. His sister has not once brought it up and he knows exactly what it cost her not to.

Whatever is going on with that photograph, it is not a family being cruel. It is a family carrying something they did not ask for, and their carrying is not a debt they owe him.

And this is where I stop writing about Beto, because there is something in your family that got quietly moved.

A place at a table, a name on a group message, an anniversary that stopped being mentioned. I am not going to ask what happened, and I am not going to make your family the villain of it.

The one who does the bringing up

I want to hand you a verse that says out loud the thing most people are too polite to say about God, and then says the better thing.

Thou, which hast shewed me great and sore troubles, shalt quicken me again, and shalt bring me up again from the depths of the earth.Psalm 71:20

Look at the honesty of the first line. He does not pretend the trouble came from nowhere. He addresses God as the one who showed it to him. That is not a complaint and it is not blame; it is a man refusing to be polite about the size of what happened.

And then twice, in one sentence: again, and again.

Quicken me again, which means make alive again, put the breath back. And bring me up again, which is the language of somebody being lifted out of a hole by hands that are not their own.

That word again is doing something specific for you. It assumes there was a first time. It assumes there was a life before this that had breath in it, and it does not treat that life as canceled.

So take this at the rectangle in the hallway. You are being brought up again, and Psalm 71:20 puts the lifting in God's hands and not in yours, and the Holy Spirit is the breath in the phrase quicken me again and He is doing that in you today.

And notice what the verse leaves alone. It does not ask the family to say anything. It does not require the photograph to go back up. It does not settle the question of what the rectangle means, and the written word is comfortable leaving that unsettled, because a man's standing was never stored on a hallway wall, and the Spirit of God does not need the wall to change in order to work.