The Photograph Above the Till

The plums are the first thing you smell, before the market is even properly open, and her hands are already doing what they have done since she was tall enough to see over the crates: turning the bruised ones to the back, stacking the good ones so the bloom shows, calling the price in the same rise and fall her grandmother uses, in the language they only speak on the stall and at home.

It is Saturday. Her mother is on the scales. Her grandmother is on the stool by the till, where she has been for forty years, telling the regulars about her knees. The stall has been in the family for three generations and it will not be in it for a fourth, because the daughter went to university and came back different, and everyone knows it, and everyone is kind about it, and nobody says anything.

She came back with faith. She found it in her second year, in a room above a bookshop, and it was real and it is still real, and somebody in that room told her, warmly, that the old her was gone. She has tried to believe that. She has tried for four years. And every time she looks up from the plums, there is the photograph pinned above the till, curling at the corners, of herself at seven in a striped sweater standing on a crate beside her grandmother, and there is nothing gone about her at all. Same hands. Same language. Same rise and fall in the price. And under it, quietly, a fear she has never said out loud, that the faith and the family are two things, and holding on to one is a failure of the other.

You are the one on the stall. It might not be fruit; it might be a language, a way of cooking, a name, a Sunday afternoon that has always been done a certain way, a whole family that does not believe what you believe and that you love more than you can say. Somebody told you the old you was gone, and meant it kindly, and you can still see her every time you look up. And you have started to wonder whether the fact that you can see her means it did not take.

A birth adds a life

Here is the first thing, and it is simply what the words mean. Jesus said to Nicodemus, at night, that unless one is born from above he cannot see the kingdom of God (John 3:3). And Nicodemus, who was a careful man, asked the careful question: how can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb?

He was thinking about it as a going back. Jesus was not. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, He said, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit (John 3:6). Two births. Two kinds of life. A birth is not a deletion of the previous one; it is the arrival of a new one. Nobody has ever been born and thereby unmade the family they were born into. Your first birth gave you the stall and the language and the grandmother on the stool. The second, if God has done it in you, gave you life from above. You have a God who adds a life and does not tear down the one He already gave you, and that is not my idea, it is what birth means, and it is what Jesus said. It is written in John 3, and it is His Spirit, the same Spirit Jesus named in that room, who makes a birth from above happen without needing your first birth to be denied.

Notice what I am not doing. I am not telling you whether or not it has happened in you. That is not mine to say and it is not this article's job. What I am telling you is what it is, so that you stop measuring it against a sentence somebody said in a room above a bookshop.

Gather the fragments

Now the verse I want you to keep, and it comes from a hillside and a lot of bread. Jesus had fed a crowd, and when they had all eaten and were full, He said something to His disciples that nobody had asked Him to say.

And when they had eaten their fill, he told his disciples, Gather up the leftover fragments, that nothing may be lost.John 6:12

Twelve baskets, they came back with. Nothing lost. Read what kind of God that is. He has just done the biggest thing anyone on that hillside had ever seen, and His next instruction is about the crumbs. Gather them. Nothing wasted. It is His habit; He does not throw away what came before the miracle. And a few verses later He says it about people: this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me (John 6:39).

You are held by a God whose stated habit is to lose nothing, and the years before the room above the bookshop are not the part He throws away. That is written in John 6, and it is His Spirit who gathers what a person had assumed was scrap. Your grandmother's language is a fragment. The rise and fall of the price is a fragment. Seven years old on a crate in a striped sweater is a fragment. He said gather them. He did not say sweep them off the stall.

Passed away, and what actually passed

Somebody will have quoted you the line: if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come (2 Corinthians 5:17). It is a glorious sentence and it is true. But read the letter it sits in. Paul, in the same breath, is talking about the old way of regarding people, the old standing, the old account of sins held against a person, and he says God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses (2 Corinthians 5:19). That is what passed away. The record against you. The old order of condemnation. Not your mother on the scales.

The same Paul stood before a crowd and said, I am a Jew, born in Tarsus, brought up in this city, educated at the feet of Gamaliel (Acts 22:3), and he said it after Damascus, as a man who kept his whole history and used it. And he wrote to Timothy that the faith in him had lived first in his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice (2 Timothy 1:5). Family was not the enemy of the new birth. Family was, in that case, where it was handed down. You have a history that is yours, redeemed and not deleted, and it is not evidence against you, because Scripture says there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, and His Spirit is the one who wrote that history into a redeemed one. It is Romans 8, and it is written, and it does not have a clause about first burning the photograph.