I have been listening to the grandsons.
The four-year-old and the six-year-old are buckled into the seats behind Mimi and me, tired from an afternoon at the children’s museum, and they are talking the way brothers talk when no one is asking them to perform. About nothing in particular. They agree about something, and then a moment later they are disagreeing about the same thing. One of them cries. The other one laughs. Then they are both laughing, and then one of them is crying again, and I cannot quite tell what started any of it. They are not aware that anything important is happening. They are just being brothers, in a back seat, on the way home.
But something important is happening. They are building a relationship neither of them knows they are building. The older one is learning what it is to have a younger brother who looks up to him and pushes back at him in the same breath. The younger one is learning what it is to have an older brother who leads him and frustrates him and makes room for him. Neither of them could tell you any of this. They will not remember this car ride. By the time they are grown, the whole afternoon will be gone from them as if it never happened.
And yet I find myself thinking — it is happening. It is happening in them right now in a way that will outlast the memory of it by thirty or forty years.
I have come to believe that most of what makes us who we are was deposited in hours we cannot recall. The way we trust, or fail to. The way we listen, or do not. The way we instinctively move toward a wounded person or away from one. The way we are with our brothers. None of this came from a lesson we remember. It came from a thousand ordinary moments that sank below the floor of memory and became part of the architecture.
There was a teaching, when your parents were young, that what mattered in raising children was the quality of time, not the quantity. Thirty good minutes a day, and the rest could be outsourced. I understand why people wanted to believe it. But I have lived long enough now to know it was not quite true. Quality matters, of course. But formation does not happen in curated half-hours. It happens in the long quiet stretches no one is paying attention to. It happens because no one is paying attention to it. The ordinary is the medium.
This is, I think, what Moses meant when he told the people of Israel to teach the words of God to their children when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. He was not prescribing a curriculum. He was describing an atmosphere. Formation saturates the ordinary or it does not happen.
The old Reformed writers understood this. They knew that a child raised in a believing household learns reverence by being among reverent people long before he can define the word. He learns the cadence of prayer by hearing it before he understands it. He learns what grace is by being treated graciously when he has not earned it. The catechism, when it comes, gives him language for what his life has already taught him. The words attach to something. Without the something, the words float free.
I have come to believe Scripture itself works this way.
When I was reading the first few chapters of the book of Acts, I noticed that the Holy Spirit took the trouble to record what the disciples did after Jesus ascended. They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching. They broke bread together. They prayed. They sold what they had and shared it. They went to the temple daily with glad and generous hearts. None of this was given to us as a manual. We are not meant to copy the property arrangement or the meal schedule. So why is it there?
I think it is there the way an unremembered afternoon is there in a grandchild — to shape the eyes that will look at everything that comes after. The details were ground into a lens. We are not meant to spend our lives examining the lens. We are meant to look through it, and to find that the church, when we encounter it, comes into focus as something we recognize.
Calvin had an image for this. He said Scripture is like a pair of spectacles given to a person whose eyes have grown dim. The spectacles are not the thing you look at. They are the thing through which you finally see. Without them, the world is a blur of competing interpretations. Through them, the world comes into focus as what it actually is — the place where God is at work, glorifying Himself in everything from a sparrow’s fall to two small voices arguing and laughing in the back seat of a car.
And here is what I want you to hear, because I think it is the most important thing I have learned: this is not only how Scripture works. It is how your whole life works.
Every experience becomes a memory, and most memories fade before you think to keep them. But nothing you have lived is ever wholly lost. The forgotten ones remain — quiet, unseen, settling into the lenses through which you will come to see the world.
Paul wrote that whatsoever things were written before were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope. Scripture is the supreme instance of this pattern, but it is not the only one. The God who authored a written Word for our instruction is also the God who has authored your days — and not only the days you keep. The day you cannot recall still teaches you. The conversation you have lost still tempers how you listen. The sorrow you have outgrown still softens how you love. The brother you fought with and laughed with before you knew what either of those things was — he is part of how you will see every relationship that comes after.
You do not see the world as it is. You see it through everything you have been given — remembered and forgotten alike — until at last you see Him face to face, and know even as you are known.
I think this is partly why the Lord gives us grandchildren. Not only for the joy of them, though there is that. But because watching them — and listening to them — teaches an old man what he could not have understood when he was young: that the hours that matter most are usually the ones no one will ever remember, and that the unremembered hour is not a lesser hour. It is, perhaps, the truest one. It is the hour in which something is being made that will last.
So I sit on the front porch now, the following day, and I watch them. They have come down off the steps and into the grass, and they have found something — an insect of some kind, I cannot tell from here — and they are crouched together over it with the seriousness that small boys bring to small discoveries. The six-year-old is explaining something to the four-year-old. The four-year-old is not entirely convinced. A moment ago they were disagreeing about who saw it first; now they are shoulder to shoulder, heads bent down together over whatever it is. They have forgotten that I am watching. They have forgotten the museum, and the car ride, and the small storm of crying and laughing that filled the back seat on the way home. They will forget this, too.
But they are brothers, and they are becoming brothers, and they do not know it. And they will, God willing, one day see Him. When they do, some part of what makes them able to see Him will have been deposited on an afternoon like this one — in a back seat where two small voices argued and laughed about nothing, on a porch step warm from the sun, in a patch of grass where two boys bent down together to see what was hidden there.
Iam Kerr
What has been deposited in you that you cannot remember?
Things I Wish My Family Knew 
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