My Grandmother Had It And I Do Not

Every family has one and in his family it was her.

You know the shape of it even if you did not know her. She prayed and things happened. That is how it is told, and it is told constantly, at every gathering, by people who were there and by people who were not born yet and have simply inherited the account.

The night she would not let them take the boy to the hospital until she had finished. The winter with the money. The thing about his uncle that nobody explains properly in front of the children even now, and he is fifty-two.

She died when he was nineteen.

And he has spent thirty-three years with a comparison running quietly underneath everything, and he has never once mentioned it to a living soul, because in his family you do not say a thing like that out loud, and because it would sound like he was asking for reassurance, and he is not, and he would be embarrassed by any.

Here is the comparison, and it is not that he wants what she had.

It is simpler and colder. He believes what she had was real. He has looked at it as honestly as a man can look at his own family's stories, allowing for how families work, and there is a core in there he cannot explain away and does not want to.

And he believes, equally, that he does not have it.

Not that he has less of it. That is not the shape. It is that whatever came down that line stopped, and he is standing at the end of the line, and it is not there, and nothing in thirty-three years of praying has suggested otherwise.

And that is you at your own stove, or you would not still be reading.

Paul's sentence about everyone, and who it was written to

Let me put the verse down first and then tell you who received it.

There are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone.1 Corinthians 12:6

That letter went to a church that had exactly your problem, running at scale. Some people there had visible things happening. Others did not. And the ones who did not had begun to conclude what you have concluded, which is that they were the lesser end of a distribution.

Paul does not tell them to try harder and he does not tell them to expect their turn.

He widens the frame until the comparison stops making sense. Varieties of gifts, same Spirit. Varieties of service, same Lord. Varieties of activities, same God, who empowers them all in everyone.

You are inside the word everyone, and it was written specifically to people who had decided they were not. It is written that there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone (1 Corinthians 12:6). The Holy Spirit is the one constant in that passage, and the varieties are the point rather than the problem.

Now your grandmother, because I am not going to reduce her.

You were right that what she had was real, and nothing here requires her to be made smaller so that you can be included. It is written that to each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good (1 Corinthians 12:7), and given is the operative word about her too. The Holy Spirit gave that woman what she had, and she did not generate it any more than you have failed to.

That last part matters. If it was given, then she did not earn it, and the line you think you are standing at the end of was never a line of merit that ran out.

And here is what thirty-three years of comparison has hidden from you, and I say it as somebody who cannot see your life and is only reading what you have said.

You do not actually know what you have.

You know what she had, because it was told, constantly, by everybody, for fifty years. You have no equivalent account of yourself, because nobody narrates a man to himself, and a family does not gather round to tell a fifty-two year old what he has been to them.

You are comparing a life that was recounted for fifty years with a life nobody has ever told back to you. It is written that we walk by faith, not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7), and the sight in this case is entirely other people's memories of somebody else. The Holy Spirit did not stop at nineteen because the storytelling did.