They Say It Is Not Ours

It was her cousin, at a christening, and he said it kindly, which is the version that stays with you.

He said: you know that whole thing was handed to us, right. It is not ours. It came off a ship.

And she said something. She does not remember exactly what. She remembers the temperature of her own face and the fact that whatever she said came out sounding like a defense, and she has replayed it in the car, in the shower, and at two in the morning ever since.

Because she loves him. That is the thing. He was not scoring a point off her. He said it the way you tell somebody a fact about their own house that you assume they already know, and then he went to get a plate.

And what she could not say, standing there with a paper napkin in her hand, is that it does not feel handed to her. It feels like the oldest thing she owns. Her grandmother's hands. The songs at four in the morning when somebody was sick. The way her whole family prays, which is not the way anybody on any ship prayed.

But she had no floor to say it from. All she had was that it felt like hers, and feelings lose that argument every single time.

You know that napkin.

Maybe somebody said it to you at a family thing. Maybe you have read it. Maybe nobody has ever said it out loud to you and you have thought it yourself, late, on your own, and put it away quickly.

And here is what makes it stick: it is not entirely wrong about the history it points at. Things did come off ships, and some of what came was terrible, and pretending otherwise would be a lie and this page will not tell you one.

The problem with the sentence is not the ships. It is the word ours.

The man on the desert road

There is a scene in Acts, and it happens very early, and the geography of it is the whole point.

And he arose and went: and, behold, a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians, who had the charge of all her treasure, and had come to Jerusalem for to worship, was returning, and sitting in his chariot read Esaias the prophet.Acts 8:27-28

Read where he is from and read what he is doing.

He is an African official, a man of great authority in his own country, and he is on a road, in a chariot, reading Isaiah out loud to himself, having already been to worship, and he is doing all of this before most of the places that would later send ships anywhere had heard a word of it.

He is not a convert somebody carried home as cargo. He came on his own, at his own expense, with his own treasury behind him, and he is reading the older half of the book because he wanted to.

You are holding something that reached your part of the world early, and it did not arrive as anybody's property. That is what this scene says by simply placing an Ethiopian official on a road with the scroll already open (Acts 8:27-28), and it is the Holy Spirit who sent Philip to that particular road on that particular afternoon, which tells you where He was working long before anybody built a ship.

And notice the direction of the traffic in that story. The man is going home. He is carrying it south, himself, in his own chariot, and Luke does not send anybody with him.

Where it actually began, which is not the west

Now hold the harder half, because a page that skips it is not worth reading.

This did not start in Europe. It also did not start in your country, and it is worth saying both of those plainly.

It started in the east, in a small country at the join of three continents, among a people who had been there for centuries, in a language that is not the language of any empire that ever sailed anywhere. Every founding document of it was written by people from that place. The songs your grandmother sang at four in the morning are downstream of songs written in a language none of the men on any ship could read either.

So when somebody says it is not ours, the honest answer is bigger than defensive.

It was never anybody's in the way that sentence means. It did not belong to the people who carried it badly, and it does not stop belonging to the people who received it, and it did not originate with either of them.

You have been brought into something that was never the property of the people who handed it on, and their carrying does not put their name on it. Scripture says the earth is the LORD's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein (Psalm 24:1), and it is the Holy Spirit who has been gathering out of every nation from the first week of this, which is why no empire that ever existed has held the title deed.