Everybody Says It Was A Long Time Ago

He has heard the same sentence eleven or twelve times now and every person who has said it has meant well.

It varies slightly. It is always some version of: well, that was a long time ago, though.

And they are right. It was. By any calendar anybody uses at work or on a form or in a conversation about the news, it was an extremely long time ago and there is nothing to be done about it and nobody alive was there.

The trouble is that he comes from people who do not count that way.

In his family, things that happened before anybody was born are spoken about in a tense that does not exist in English. Not as history. Not as the present either. There is a way his grandmother said certain things, about events centuries old, that made them feel like the weather last week, and he grew up inside that and it is simply how time works in him.

So somebody says, that was ages ago, and he says, mm, and the conversation moves on, and something in him has nowhere to stand.

Because they are not wrong about the calendar and he is not wrong about the memory, and there is no version of that conversation that does not make one of them sound ridiculous.

He stopped trying to describe it about four years ago. It is not a grievance. He has no complaint about a single person who has said it to him. It is just that he lives in a house with a different clock in it and there is no way to mention that at lunch.

You know this if it is yours.

Maybe your family holds something the way his does. Maybe you came from somewhere that remembers, or a people that remembers, or a house where one thing that happened before you were born is still in the room. Maybe you have watched somebody's face when you said the year out loud and decided not to do that again.

Nobody has done anything to you here. Everyone means well and everyone is being reasonable and the loneliness is not anybody's fault.

He was in it at the time

Here is a line that does not argue about how long ago anything was, and does something better.

In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them: in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; and he bare them, and carried them all the days of old.Isaiah 63:9

In all their affliction he was afflicted.

Read the tense and read who is in the sentence. Not: He watched it happen. Not: He knew about it. He was afflicted, in it, at the time, along with the people it was happening to.

And then the last phrase: all the days of old. He carried them through the whole stretch. Not from a distance and not afterward.

You are holding a memory that somebody else was actually present for, and He was in it while it was happening rather than reading about it later. That is what Isaiah 63:9 claims, affliction shared rather than observed (Isaiah 63:9), and it is the Holy Spirit who is described in the following verses of that same chapter as being grieved, which is not a word anybody uses about a spectator.

That is the thing you have not been able to say at lunch. It is not that you think the calendar is wrong. It is that you know somebody who was there.

Nobody at that lunch is being criticized

Let me be plain, because you are protective of those people and you should be.

Nothing here says that the person who told you it was a long time ago was being dismissive. They were making conversation and they were factually correct and they had no way of knowing what they were walking into.

There is no offense to be taken here and none is being manufactured. A man who lives with a long clock cannot expect the world to run on it, and most of the world is not being careless, it is simply using the calendar everybody uses.

You have not been wronged at lunch, and there is nobody in this to be angry with. Scripture says charity thinketh no evil (1 Corinthians 13:5), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes it possible to feel alone in a conversation without concluding that anybody in it was unkind, which is one of the harder pieces of work He does in anybody.

And this page will not tell you what happened or whose it was either. You are not being handed an account, and nobody is being named here. The word says judge nothing before the time (1 Corinthians 4:5), and His Spirit is the one who makes that a resting place, which is what keeps a memory from turning into a case.

Two clocks, both accurate

Here is the shape of it, which may be the most useful thing on this page.

You have been treating this as a disagreement about a fact, and it is not one. It is two instruments measuring different things.

The calendar measures elapsed time. That is what it is for and it is very good at it and the number it gives is correct.

A family's memory measures something else entirely: how present a thing still is in the people carrying it. And by that measure the number is also correct, and it is a completely different number, and neither instrument is broken.

You have not been mismeasuring anything, and both clocks in that conversation were telling the truth. Scripture says a thousand years are with the Lord as a day, and a day as a thousand years (2 Peter 3:8), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a comfort rather than a curiosity, because a God for whom those are interchangeable is not confused by a family that remembers.