There were eleven of them that morning and she was the youngest and she was nine.
It was the last week of August and the water came off the hill and it was so cold it took her breath, and she remembers a woman's hand on the back of her head and somebody's coat put round her afterward, and she remembers the walk up the bank because the stones hurt.
She remembers nothing else about it at all.
Nobody asked her whether she wanted to. She wants that said plainly, without it becoming an accusation, because it was 1953 and it was that sort of chapel and everybody went in, and the four other children that morning were her cousins and one of them was seven.
She is eighty one.
And here is the thing she has carried since, and it has never once been sharp and it has never once gone away.
She does not know whether anything happened.
She has been in church her whole life. She has read her Bible through more times than she has counted. She has prayed every day since she was a young woman and she would tell you God has been very good to her.
And underneath all of that, since she was nine years old, there has been a question about a cold river: whether that was real, or whether it was eleven people and an August morning and a chapel doing what it did every year.
She has never asked anybody. Who would she have asked. By the time she was old enough to frame the question the men who would have answered it were dead, and after about forty she had the sense it would look like ingratitude.
You know the question. Yours may not involve water. But you know what it is to carry something unresolved for so long that it has stopped being urgent and has simply become part of the furniture of your own head.
The whole of it was His doing
Let me name the pit before we go to the book, and let me be careful, because there is a version of this article that tells an old woman where she stands and I am not going to write it. I do not know, and no page can, and a stranger issuing a verdict to somebody of eighty one would be doing exactly what a chapel did in 1953.
You are not the one who could have settled this, and neither were the eleven people on that bank. John 1:13 rules out blood and the will of the flesh and the will of man by name, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the birthing.
The pit is not the river. The pit is that you have been looking for the answer in your own memory of a morning, and a nine year old's memory of a cold morning was never going to carry a question that size, and so it has sat unresolved for seventy two years and will sit there for another twenty if nobody says anything.
Here is the verse.
Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.John 1:13
Read the exclusions, because your river is in them.
Not of blood: not by family, not by whose child you were, not by which chapel your people belonged to.
Not of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man: not by anybody's decision. Not by yours at nine, and this is the important half, not by theirs either. Not by the man who put a hand on your head, not by the deacons, not by the custom of that place in the last week of August.
But of God.
Every mechanism you have been examining for seventy two years is named in that verse and ruled out, including the ones that were not yours.
Take that in your own chair, and know it is not me being gentle with an old woman, it is what is written. The whole of it was God's doing and none of it was anybody else's to accomplish. John 1:13 rules out every human route by name, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the birthing, and He did not do it because eleven people went into a river and He did not fail to do it because they did.
You are not the one who could have settled this, and neither were the eleven people on that bank. John 1:13 rules out blood and the will of the flesh and the will of man by name, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the birthing, which no chapel could accomplish or prevent.
And here I draw the line this site always draws, in the same breath. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and He is not a woman either; He is spirit. The birth language in John is one of the ways Scripture describes Him with a mother's picture beside a father's, and both are His own, and it does not make the Spirit a woman and it does not make God a goddess.
The picture was never what made it true.
You are not the one who was ever able to settle this, and neither were they. John 1:13 rules out blood and the will of the flesh and the will of man by name, which is every mechanism in that August morning, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the birthing, and a chapel could neither accomplish it nor prevent it.
That is where seventy two years of this can be set down, and it can be set down this afternoon.
Because the question you have been asking is not whether God has been at work in your life. You would not ask that; you have eighty one years of evidence and you would tell anybody who asked that He has been very good to you.
The question has been about a morning, and about whether a morning that you cannot properly remember, and did not choose, did the thing it was supposed to do.
And John 1:13 says that no morning ever did. Not that one and not a better one. Not blood, not the will of the flesh, not the will of man. The whole of it is God's and always was, and a cold river in 1953 was never the mechanism and could not have been.
It was never yours to settle and it was never theirs to accomplish. That is John 1:13 read exactly as it stands, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the whole of it, and He is not embarrassed by a chapel that took eleven people down to a river in August.
And I will not tell you what happened that morning. That is between you and God and He has had seventy two years with you and has not been silent in them.
What I will say is that a woman who has prayed every day since she was young, and read that book through more times than she has counted, is not somebody God has been distant from, whatever the water did or did not do.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud in your own chair. You are in Christ, and the authority to speak over a question seventy two years old is delegated to you in Him; it does not depend on your remembering anything more than you do, and you will not. These stand on what is written in John and are carried by the Holy Spirit, not by anything that happened or did not happen in a river. What He gives you to rest in, and when, is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own timing.
- Question I have carried since I was nine, you are not settled by anything I can remember, and I say so in the name of Jesus. John 1:13 says born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
- Morning in that cold water, you were never the mechanism and you could not have been, and neither was any better morning. It is written that every human route is ruled out by name, and His Spirit is the one who does the birthing, which no chapel in 1953 could accomplish or prevent.
- Lord, You are neither male nor female, and You give birth by Your Spirit. I read John 1:13 out loud in this chair and I say that the whole of it was Your doing, and when the river opens up again I am not going back down the bank.
John 1:13
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