Nobody Believed Me

Charmaine told two people within a week and she has told nobody in the eighteen years since.

The first was her sister, on the phone, and her sister was warm about it in a way that was worse than being contradicted. There was a particular kind of gentleness, the sort you use with somebody who has had a shock, and a change of subject about ninety seconds later that was not quite quick enough to be accidental.

The second was a man at church whose judgement she respected enormously. He listened properly, which she appreciated, and then said something about how God works through ordinary means more often than people realize, and that it was wonderful how things had come together.

He was not unkind. He was doing what a careful person does.

And Charmaine went home and understood two things at once, which is why she has never tried again. The first is that she could not prove any of it and never would be able to. The second is that both of them had, in different registers, filed it.

She is fifty-one and the thing happened when she was thirty-three, and she still thinks about it often, and it has become in eighteen years a private object rather than an event. It exists only in her.

And the part she would not say out loud is that she has occasionally wondered whether they were right. Not often. But an account that has never once been received begins, over a long enough period, to feel thinner to the person holding it, and she has noticed that happening and has not liked it.

You may know those two faces.

Maybe you also told somebody once. Maybe they were kind about it. And maybe kind was worse.

The first report was filed under idle tales

There is a morning in Luke where several women come back from a tomb with the most important report in the history of the world, and here is what happens to it.

And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not.Luke 24:11

Idle tales.

The Greek behind it is a word from medicine, used of the ravings of somebody delirious. That is the register in which the first account of the resurrection was received.

And look who is doing the receiving. Not skeptics. Not opponents. The apostles. Men who had been with Him for three years, who had watched things, who had every reason to be the most receptive audience available anywhere on earth that morning.

They filed it.

Which tells you something that nobody ever says out loud: an account not being received is not evidence about the account. The best-attested event in Scripture was, on its first telling, not believed by the people best placed to believe it.

And your account not being received was never evidence about the account. The written word records the first resurrection report being filed under delirium by the apostles themselves, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who has been silent for eighteen years.

And nothing about you is under review for what two faces did. The word puts the failure to believe on the hearers rather than on the women, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than reopening your evidence.

What eighteen years of it does

Now the thing you noticed and did not like, because I think it is the actual injury and it is not what you think.

An account that is never received gets thinner to the person holding it.

That is not doubt creeping in and it is not the memory degrading. It is a fact about how human beings hold things: we are social animals and our accounts are stabilized by other people's reception of them, and a story that has never once been held by anybody else has nothing external holding its shape.

Which means the thinning is not information about whether it happened. It is information about the conditions in which you have been keeping it, and those conditions have been solitary for eighteen years.

And the thinning is about the conditions rather than about the event. The word says two are better than one, and it treats human corroboration as a structural support rather than a luxury, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a diagnosis rather than a doubt.

And you are not required to prove it to hold it. The word never asks the women at the tomb to produce evidence and simply records what they saw, and the Spirit is the one who keeps a thing that no room has ever confirmed.

What I am not going to tell you to do

Let me be plain about the two obvious instructions I am not giving.

I am not telling you to tell it again. You have told it twice, to the two most sensible candidates available to you, and both filed it, and there is no reason to think a third would go differently and every reason to expect it would cost you something. You are entitled to keep your account and your peace.

And I am not telling you it was definitely what you think it was. I was not there. I have no way to assess it and would be doing exactly what the man at church did if I offered you a confident reading in the opposite direction.

What I will say is that the two things you concluded that evening were both true, and neither of them was the conclusion you drew from them.

You cannot prove it. True. And unprovable is not the same as untrue, and the women had nothing to prove either.

Both of them filed it. Also true. And so did the apostles, on the best-attested morning there has ever been.

And He still does this whatever any room did with your account. The word puts the doing in Him rather than in the reception, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than requiring a corroborating witness.