I Was Nine and I Did Not Understand

There is a photograph on the shelf of a girl in a yellow cardigan holding a certificate from a holiday club, and the girl in it prayed a prayer on a Thursday afternoon in a church hall that smelled of squash and floor polish, and meant it as much as a nine year old means anything, which is completely.

Hannah is twenty-four now and she has effectively fired that girl.

It happened at twenty-two, at a student thing, and it was not dramatic. Somebody gave a talk about counting the cost, and about how a lot of people have a childhood decision they are relying on, and Hannah sat in a plastic chair and did some arithmetic. She thought: I was nine. I did not know what sin was. I did not know what the cross cost. I said the words because the lady said the words and because I liked the lady and because everybody put their hand up.

So she prayed it again that night, properly, as an adult, understanding it.

And here is the thing nobody warned her about. It did not settle her. Because a month later she was lying in bed thinking about her adult version and she thought: but do I understand it now? And she began to see, honestly, that she does not understand the cross. Not really. Not the way it deserves. And if understanding is the qualifier, then her adult prayer is also a child's prayer, only with a bigger vocabulary.

That is where she has been stuck for two years. She has quietly retired her own testimony, she flinches when anybody asks how she became a Christian, and she has begun to suspect that there is no age at which a person understands enough, which is the first true thing she has thought about this in a long time.

You may not have a yellow cardigan on a shelf. But you have a version of you that you have decided did not count, and you have replaced it with a better one, and the better one has started to look thin too.

So we should go and read what the qualifier actually is, because Paul names it in one verse and it is not understanding.

Read what the verse rules out

Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost.Titus 3:5

Look at the structure. There is a not, and there is a but, and everything depends on which side of that line your qualifier sits.

Not by works of righteousness which we have done. Anything done by us is on the excluded side. And here is the question worth asking slowly: what is a well-understood prayer? It is a work we have done. A better one than a poorly understood prayer, no doubt. Still on the wrong side of the not.

But according to his mercy he saved us. That is the whole qualifier. His mercy. Not the depth of the comprehension of the person receiving it.

You were saved according to His mercy, and it is already done, and the doing of it never once ran through your understanding. I am not being kind to a girl in a yellow cardigan. It is written in Titus 3:5, and the Holy Spirit is named in that very verse as the one doing the renewing, and He is the one carrying it to a twenty-four year old with a photograph on a shelf.

Nobody understands enough, and that was never the arrangement

Now let me say the thing that Hannah worked out on her own at one in the morning, because she was right and she needs to be told she was right.

There is no age at which a person understands it. Paul, who wrote more about the cross than anyone, called it a mystery and said we see through a glass darkly. The angels are described as stooping to look into it. If comprehension were the qualifier, the qualified group would be empty.

What a nine year old had was not a small understanding of a big thing. It was a real trust in a real Person, held in a small hand, which is the same shape of thing an adult has in a bigger hand, and neither hand is the point. The point is who is being trusted.

You are held by the mercy of God and not by the size of your grasp, and it is already His mercy holding it. Scripture says that unless you turn and become like little children you will not enter (Matthew 18:3), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that written line land on a woman who has been trying to grow her way into what a child was welcomed into.

The girl in the photograph was not the one doing the saving

And here is where I want to be tender, because Hannah has been unkind to somebody who cannot defend herself.

She has spent two years quietly saying that the girl in the yellow cardigan was too small to be taken seriously. But the girl was not the one doing the saving. She was the one being saved. Nobody in that church hall was relying on a nine year old to hold the arrangement together, and God, who was there, was not squinting at her theology.

That girl came with what she had. That is all any of us has ever done.

You are the one He had mercy on, and it is already true of both of you, the nine year old and the twenty-four year old, and it was always the same mercy. It is written that He saved us according to His mercy, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman look at her own childhood photograph without flinching.