The Reason You Said Yes At Seventeen

Saturday, half past nine, and the concrete step is already warm through his jeans.

He has spread two sheets of newspaper and it is not enough newspaper, which he knew when he spread it. Beside him is a terracotta pot with a hairline crack running down one side, and in his hands is the old plastic one, and the plant will not come out.

He works a knife around the rim. The plastic gives with a sound like a knuckle cracking, and the whole root ball slides free in one piece, and it is not soil. It is a solid white spiral. Roots wound round and round on themselves so many times that the shape of the pot is still in them after he has taken the pot away.

He sits back on his heels and looks at it for longer than the job needs.

He took this plant as a cutting when he was seventeen. A woman two streets over ran a kitchen where teenagers ate everything in the fridge and nobody was asked to explain themselves, and she snipped a piece off the one on her sill and wrapped the end in a wet paper towel and said here, keep it alive. That was the same month he said yes.

And the reason he said yes was five words long. He remembers them exactly, because he said them to her at the sink and she did not laugh at him.

He liked me first.

That is what a seventeen year old had. No footnotes. No framework. A thing he had noticed and could not get around, that the whole business had started on the other side, before he had done anything to deserve being noticed, and that it had not stopped once since.

Twenty five years of good words came after that. Real ones, earned ones. He can tell you what atonement means and where the arguments run and which parts he holds firmly and which parts he holds loosely. He does not regret one hour of it. He would do it again.

He just has not said the five words out loud since roughly the year he learned better ones.

The new pot is bigger and it has a crack in it, and it will do. He teases the spiral open with his thumbs, which feels like something you should not be allowed to do to a living thing, and the roots come loose and hang down and find the new soil, and he tamps it in and waters it until it runs out of the bottom onto the newspaper he already knew was not enough.

Then he sits there on the warm step with dirt on his hands and says it out loud to a plant, feeling ridiculous, and finds it is still entirely true.

The floor did not move when the furniture arrived

Let me say the thing that has to be said first, because this is where a message like this usually goes wrong.

The learning was not the problem. Every word you picked up, every long argument you followed all the way to the end, every distinction you can now make that you could not make at seventeen: keep it. Nobody here is going to romanticize not knowing things, and anyone who tells you your best years of faith were the ignorant ones is selling you something. The furniture is good furniture. Some of it is beautiful.

The furniture is just not the floor.

You are standing on something older than your vocabulary, and it has held every year since without being renegotiated. That is not my flourish, it is the order 1 John 4:19 puts down: we love him, because he first loved us. The Holy Spirit put that sentence in that order deliberately, and the same Spirit is holding it open under you this morning while you read it.

Read the order again. Not we love Him and therefore He responded. Not we understood and therefore we loved. He went first. Everything you have said, learned, believed, argued and doubted since is downstream of a movement that was already complete before you had language for it.

"We love him, because he first loved us."1 John 4:19, KJV

So the five words a seventeen year old had were not a rough draft. They were the thing itself, said in the vocabulary available. You have not outgrown that sentence, you have furnished it, and His word never once told you the furnishing was the foundation. His Spirit is the one who put the noticing in you at seventeen and He has not withdrawn it since.

Here is why this matters right now, and not as a nostalgia exercise. When you are worn out from arguments, the temptation is to go looking for a better argument. But the thing that is actually load bearing under you is not an argument at all, and you cannot lose it in a debate, because you did not win it in one.

You were loved first. That is written, it is not a mood, and it is the Spirit of God who makes an old sentence present tense in a man sitting on a warm step with dirt on his hands, instead of a fact filed under history.

Go back underneath. Not instead of what you learned. Underneath it, where the floor is.