His Five Words and Mine

Vernon had a sentence, and Della could say it in his voice if you asked her to, which people sometimes do.

Five words. He said it at the table. He said it in the truck. He said it at two funerals that she knows of and once, quietly, in a waiting room in the year they thought they were going to lose their daughter.

He was not a talker. That is what made it carry. In fifty-one years Della never once heard him give a speech about anything, and she heard those five words maybe a thousand times, always in the same flat unhurried way, usually while he was doing something with his hands.

He has been gone two years in November.

And in the spring she was on the porch shelling beans and a woman from down the road said something about him, kindly, and then said, and what would you say?

Meaning: what is yours.

And Della sat there with the bowl in her lap and could not produce one.

She is not without faith. She wants that understood and she has said it to herself several times since. She has prayed every day of her adult life and she prays now and it is not a performance. She sat with him at the end and she was not frightened and neither was he.

She has simply never made a sentence.

She had his. It was in the house the way the smell of the house was in the house, and she agreed with it, and when it was said at that table she meant it. And in fifty-one years of standing beside a short true sentence she never once needed to write her own, because there was one going.

She is seventy-six.

And what she found on that porch, and has not been able to put down since, is that she does not know whether the five words were hers or whether she was simply near them.

And you may have your own. A parent's, or a husband's, or the one your first minister said so often that it is what you hear when you think about God. And somebody may have asked you what yours is, and you may have found the bowl very interesting for a moment.

The shortest confession in the Gospels is five words long

Take this off first, my love, because you have carried it since that porch and it was never yours.

You are not a woman without faith. You never were. Scripture keeps its shortest and best confession for a man who had nothing prepared, and it is the Holy Spirit, not fifty-one years of practice, who puts a sentence into a mouth. Set it down here beside the bowl. It is heavy, and there is nothing shameful under it.

Now hear it, and hear who says it.

The man had missed the whole thing. He was not in the room the first time, he had said out loud and in company that he would not believe it without evidence, and a week later he is standing in front of the evidence and everybody in that room knows what he said.

And what comes out of him is not an argument, an apology, or an explanation.

Thomas said to Him, "My Lord and my God!"John 20:28

Five words.

That is the highest thing anybody says about Jesus in that whole Gospel, and it is said by the one who had been holding out, in a room, with no preparation whatsoever, and it is five words long.

And notice the two smallest words in it, because they are the ones doing the work. My, twice. Not the Lord and the God. Mine.

That is what a confession is. It is not a summary. It is a person putting their own word on it out loud, and Scripture keeps its best one to fifty percent possessive pronouns.

You have that available. Right now, at seventy-six, with a bowl in your lap. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who puts such a thing in a person, and He has never once required a woman to have made one before.

Now let me be careful, my love, because there is a ditch on this side.

Nothing here says Vernon's sentence was a substitute or that fifty-one years of standing beside it were wasted. They were not. That sentence went into your daughter and into two funerals and into a waiting room in a bad year, and God used every one of those, and the smell of the house is a real thing and it was a good house.

That is what furniture is. It is real, and you sit on it, and he chose it.

And nothing here is telling you to replace his, or to stop saying it, or to decide that yours has to be different from his in order to be yours. It may turn out to be the same five words. That is allowed and it would not make them borrowed.

The point is only that you have never said one out loud in your own voice, and a woman who has never said one does not know she has it. Scripture puts the saying in the mouth of the one who has it, and His Spirit is the one who supplies it.

Here is the tender part, and I say it as I would across a bowl of beans. You are not afraid there is nothing there.

You are afraid that if you say it and it comes out in his voice, you will find out you were only ever near it, and you have loved that man too long for that to be a comfortable thing to test. His Spirit is not testing you and Scripture is not asking you to prove anything.