I Was Raised To Think Wet Means Ill

You can hear her saying it. That is the thing.

You are standing at a window looking at rain, and a sentence arrives fully formed, and it is not in your voice. It is in your mother's, and hers came from her mother, and it says: they will catch something.

And you have never once examined it. Why would you? It arrived the way the alphabet arrived and the way you learned to hold a knife. It is not an opinion you formed. It is furniture.

But it is running your week. Every wet afternoon in this house is decided by a sentence somebody else said in a different decade, and you have been carrying it out faithfully without ever asking whether you agree with it.

I want to be careful with this, because there is a cheap version of this article that would ask you to be embarrassed about your mother, and I am not writing that one. She was doing her best with what she had, and a great deal of what she handed you is good.

The faith that dwelt first in thy grandmother

There is a line in Timothy about how things arrive in a person, and it is unusually specific about the route.

When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also. (2 Timothy 1:5, King James Version)

Which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice.

Read what Paul is doing. He is naming a chain of women and saying: this thing came down that line, and it is real in Timothy now.

And that is a genuinely beautiful thing to have said about a household. What comes down a line like that is not one item. It is a whole inheritance, arriving together, and nobody sorts it at the time.

You are carrying something handed down through women who loved you, and it was never a thing to be ashamed of or to throw out. 2 Timothy 1:5 names the chain and honors every link in it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as gratitude rather than as an accusation against anybody.

And notice: Paul names what he is keeping. He does not list everything Lois and Eunice believed. He picks out the unfeigned faith, by name, and says that is what he sees in Timothy.

You have been shown how to keep something without keeping everything, and it was never disloyalty to name which part you are carrying on. The written word selects one thing out of an inheritance and praises it specifically, and the Spirit of God is what gives a woman permission to sort a legacy without rejecting it.

Sorting is not rejecting

Now the practical heart of it, and it is one distinction.

Sorting is not rejecting.

You can keep your mother's care, her attention, her instinct that a child needs looking after, all of it, and set down one specific belief about rain that she happened to hold and that turned out not to be true.

That is what everybody does with an inheritance, in every generation, and it is not a betrayal. An inherited belief can be looked at without being ungrateful, and keeping one thing does not mean keeping all of it.

You are allowed to examine one item, and it was never an attack on the person who handed it to you. 2 Timothy 1 names one thing out of a whole legacy and honors it by name, which is exactly why the Spirit of God can help a woman sort without any of it turning into a grievance.

And here is the honest bit about the belief itself. Being wet is uncomfortable and it is not the thing that makes a child ill. Your mother did not know that, because almost nobody knew it, and she was doing exactly the right thing with the information she had.

So the sentence in her voice was love, operating on the best available understanding of 1974. That is worth respecting and it is not worth obeying.

Ten minutes and dry clothes

So here is the practical part, and it is designed to test the belief rather than to argue with it.

Go out for ten minutes in the wet. Then come home, and put dry clothes on, and get warm.

You are able to test a sentence rather than debate it, and it has never once been rebellious to go and find out. The passage names one strand of an inheritance and lets the rest be, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman doing something her mother would have questioned.

And then watch the week. Not to prove anything to anybody. Just to have the information yourself, in your own house, about your own children.

The reason it has to be ten minutes and dry clothes afterward is that it removes every real objection. Nobody is out in it for an hour. Nobody stays wet. What is being tested is the sentence and nothing else.

You are keeping everything that mattered while you set down one thing, and it has never once been possible to inherit a person's love and their entire understanding at the same time. 2 Timothy 1:5 keeps the faith and does not require the whole of Lois, and the Spirit of God is the one who is out on a wet street with a woman finding out for herself.