The Girl You Baptized At Fourteen

The photograph is on a shelf in the office behind a box of spare bulbs, which is where things go when you cannot display them and cannot throw them away.

In it the girl is fourteen and soaking wet and laughing with her mouth wide open, and somebody has put a towel round her that is far too big, and half of it is trailing in the water. Her mother is on the left with both hands over her own face. There is a boy at the back of the shot who has clearly just been pushed in.

She said something in the water that day, before she went under. She said, out loud, in front of about ninety people, without being asked to: I want everybody to know I actually mean this.

She is twenty two now.

The last time she answered a message was two years ago in March. It said thanks, that's kind, and it took her four days to send it, and it was in reply to a message that had taken forty minutes to write and had been rewritten twice to sound less like it was checking up on her.

There have been eleven messages since. Birthdays. The thing about her grandmother. A photograph of the old youth room being redecorated, which was a mistake, and she knew it was a mistake as she pressed send.

Nothing. Not read receipts, not a thumbs up, nothing.

And here is the part she has never said to a living soul. She has stopped sending them. She stopped in January. And she cannot decide whether stopping was respect, or dignity, or self protection, or giving up, and it matters enormously to her which one it was, and she cannot find out.

The photograph stays behind the bulbs. She looked at it in the spring and had to sit down.

Say what it is before you say anything else

Before there is one word of comfort in this, I want to name what this is, because I think you have not been allowed to.

It is a bereavement. Not a metaphorical one. A person who was in your life every week for years, whom you loved, whose voice you knew, is gone out of it, and there was no funeral, no casserole, no card, and nobody in your world calls it a loss. They call it a shame. They call it what happens with that age group. Somebody probably said, at some point, that she will come back round, and meant it kindly, and it landed like a stone.

That is a real grief and you have been carrying it without a single one of the ordinary supports that grief comes with. And carrying it alone is why it has weighed what it has weighed.

I am not going to hurry you past that. Sit in it for a second longer, because it is true and true things deserve to be sat in.

Now here is what God says, and He says it into exactly this.

Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands.Isaiah 49:15-16

Look at what that verse concedes before it comforts.

Yea, they may forget. God does not say human beings never forget each other. He says the strongest bond He can name might fail, and then He puts His own faithfulness on the other side of it. He tells the truth about people first. Scripture does not need to pretend nobody ever drifts out of anybody's life in order to say what it wants to say.

So hear this over you, in an office with a photograph behind a box of bulbs. You are not forgotten. That is not my kindness; it is what His word says God has done with a name, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes graven on the palms of my hands and makes it something a woman can actually feel while she is sitting on the floor of an office.

Now let me get at the question that has been eating you, which is whether stopping in January was giving up.

It was not. Eleven unanswered messages over two years from somebody who never once made it about herself is not somebody giving up. It is somebody who stopped knocking on a door because she loves the person behind it enough not to make the knocking their problem. That is a decision made out of respect, and I am telling you plainly what it was, because you have been unable to tell yourself.

And you are not required to keep proving your love by acts that cost her something. His word never once measures faithfulness by persistence in contact, and the Holy Spirit is not standing beside you counting the months since your last message.

Here is the thing I want you to hold, and I am going to be careful with it. I do not know whether she comes back. Nobody who tells you they do know is telling you the truth, and I will not put a promise in your hands that God did not put in mine.

What I know is what the verse says. Her name is graven, and graven is a word about permanence in something hard, and the palms of God's hands are not a place a person falls out of because they have stopped answering messages. She is not lost to Him and she was never held by your grip in the first place.

You are held right now, in that office, in a grief nobody has acknowledged. His word says He will not forget, in the plainest possible terms, and the Holy Spirit has been sitting with a woman on the floor next to a box of bulbs for two years.