The Birthday I Missed

The album is dark green and it is on the second shelf in the front room and it has been there for nine years and Marsha has never opened it past a certain page.

Page eleven is the summer. Page thirteen is Devon's eighth birthday, which was in the backyard, with about twenty people, and a cake her sister made in the shape of a football, and bunting that her mother put up because somebody had to.

Marsha was upstairs. She came down at about six, when most of it was over, and she was pleasant, and everybody was extremely kind, and her sister had done all of it and never once said a word about it, then or since.

Devon is seventeen now. He is a good boy. He mentions his eighth birthday sometimes because there is a photograph of him with cake on his face that everybody thinks is funny, and every time he mentions it Marsha laughs along, and she has never once looked at page thirteen.

She stopped drinking six years ago. The house is different, her mother lives with them now, she cooks on Sundays for eleven people. That whole part of her life is genuinely over.

And the album is on the second shelf, and she dusts around it.

You know that album. It might be photographs, a video, a school report, a box in a loft. There is a record of a day you were not present for, and it is in your own house, and you have organized your life so as never to open it.

You are a new creation and the old things are described as already passed, and you were never the same woman standing in front of that shelf. Paul says if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a present fact for a woman who dusts around an album.

If any man be in Christ

Let me name it exactly, because it is not what people assume.

You are not avoiding your son's face. You would look at his face all day. What you are avoiding is the woman who is not in those photographs, because the album is not a record of a party, it is a record of an absence, and the absence has your name on it.

And I want to be clear about what this article is not doing. It is not telling you to sit Devon down and say something. He is seventeen and he tells that story because a boy with cake on his face is funny, and what he needs from you may be nothing at all. That is a decision for you and for people who know him, and it is not the point of this.

Here is the verse.

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.2 Corinthians 5:17

A new creature. Not a repaired one. The word is the one used for creation, the thing God does out of nothing, and it is not the language of renovation. It says that what exists now is a new thing rather than an improved version of the old thing.

You are a new thing rather than a mended one, and you were never presented to God as a renovation project. That is what stands written in 2 Corinthians 5, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a fact about the specific woman standing in front of a bookshelf.

And old things are passed away. The tense of that is done, completed, already occurred. It does not say old things will pass away when you have finished processing them, and it does not say old things pass away when you can look at the photographs. It is written as a thing that has already happened to you, which means it happened before you were ready and without waiting for your permission.

You have that in the past tense already, and you were never the one who had to complete it. Scripture reports it as a finished action, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a woman from treating a completed thing as an outstanding task.

And then behold. It is a word for look. It means turn your attention to this, stop and see it. Paul puts an instruction to look right in the middle of a verse about the past being gone, and the direction he points is at what is new. It is not a demand that you stare at the old thing until it stops hurting. It is an instruction to look somewhere else, on purpose, at something that is genuinely there.

You are being pointed at something real and present, and you were never required to keep staring at nine years ago. The written word says behold and points forward, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns a person's attention on purpose.

So here is what I want to say about page thirteen, and I want to say it carefully. You can look at it now. Not because you owe it to anybody, and not as a punishment, and not to prove anything. You can look at it because the woman looking at it is not the woman in the story, and that is a fact about you before it is a feeling.

And the plain thing, as always here. Nine years of dusting around an album is worth telling somebody about. A counselor, a friend, your sister, the room where people say true things out loud. That is God's kindness with a face on it and there is no shame anywhere in it.