The Stories Her Grandmother Told

Loretta's grandmother was the best storyteller in that county and everybody said so.

She had about forty of them and she told them in the same voice she used for everything else, which is what made them what they were. There was no signal. She would tell you about a cousin's wedding and then about the road past the church and you would not, as a child, be given any assistance in telling which kind of story you had just been handed.

Loretta is thirty-nine. She lives in her grandmother's house, which she inherited in 2019. She has a job at the county clerk's office and two kids and a truck she is fond of.

Since November she has not gone out on the back porch after dark.

I am not going to tell you what happened in November. I want to be plain about why. I was not on that porch. Nobody who writes anything on the internet was on that porch, or on yours. And the surest way for a woman in Loretta's position to be harmed is a stranger deciding, at a distance and with great confidence, what was out there.

So: something happened in November, and Loretta brings the wood in before it gets dark now, all of it, whether she needs it or not, and if she forgets she goes without.

Here is what she cannot get past. It is not really the porch.

It is that a set of stories she has not thought about in twenty-five years came back into her head that night in the exact voice her grandmother told them in, and they have not gone away since, and Loretta cannot work out whether her grandmother believed a word of them, and there is nobody left alive to ask.

Here is the day it caught.

Her daughter, eleven, said at supper, "Mama, tell us one of Nana's stories."

And Loretta said, "Not tonight."

And her daughter said, "You never do anymore."

You know this. Something you were handed as a child, half in earnest, that you never sorted through, and then one bad night as an adult puts it all back in the room in the original voice.

A question He never answers

Let me be exact about what I am not doing here, because this is the article where being careless would do harm.

I am not going to sort your grandmother's stories. I am not going to tell you which of them were true, and I am not going to name anything or describe anything or tell you what was on that porch. I am not going to teach you a technique, a prayer to say at the back door, or any procedure at all. There is a great deal of that available and I am not adding to it.

And I am not going to leave you more afraid than you felt when this page opened. If you finish it warier of the dark, or warier of your grandmother, I have failed at the one thing this article is for.

What I am going to do is read you the opening of Psalm 27 and point at what it does not do.

The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? the LORD is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?Psalm 27:1

Two statements and two questions. And here is the thing about the questions: they never get answered.

He asks whom shall I fear and then he simply goes on. The rest of the psalm is about hosts encamping and war rising and false witnesses, and he never comes back and names anybody. The questions are rhetorical, and rhetorical questions are how a person refuses to make a list.

He could have answered. He could have said: not the Philistines, not Saul, not the men at the gate. He does not. He puts two statements about God on one side and then declines, twice, to itemize the other side.

You are inside a psalm that refuses to name what a person might be afraid of, and the refusal is deliberate rather than an oversight. Psalm 27:1 asks twice and answers neither time, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that refusal off the page and onto a back porch in November.

And look at the two things he does name. My light and my salvation. Light is what you want when it is dark and you cannot see what is there. Salvation is what you want when something is actually happening. He names both, in that order, and then he stops describing anything else.

You have been given a light rather than an inventory, and the psalm chose that on purpose. It is written that the Lord is light and salvation and strength, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an ancient sufficiency a present one.

Your grandmother is not the problem

Now here is the part I most want you to have, and it is not about the porch.

Loretta has been trying to determine what her grandmother believed. It is not possible. The woman is dead, she told forty stories in one voice over eighteen years, and there was very likely no settled position inside her to find. People who tell stories that way are usually not holding a doctrine. They are holding a county.

And the audit is what is costing the sleep, not the porch. By two in the morning Loretta is not frightened of anything out back; she is frightened that she cannot sort the file.

You have been asked to finish something with no finish available, and there is nothing in Scripture that requires it of anybody. Psalm 27:1 declines to itemize and the psalm proceeds perfectly well without the list, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an unfinished audit safe to set down.

And I want to say something about the stories themselves, because there are two errors here and both of them hurt.

The first is to decide your grandmother was a fool. She was not. She was a woman holding a place and its people and its dead in the only container she had, and forty stories in one voice is a real kind of love.

The second is to treat the stories as information about the unseen. They are not that either. They were never offered as that, and Scripture does not run on them, and no verse anywhere gets stronger or weaker depending on what a woman in that county said about a road.

You are not required to rule on your grandmother in order to be safe on your own porch, and Psalm 27 settles the second without touching the first. Psalm 27:1 puts God on one side and declines to specify the other, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps a family's memory from being turned into either a doctrine or a joke.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. A person waking suddenly, frightened, unable to move or speak, is describing something with ordinary medical explanations that are common and well understood and treatable, and a winter of broken sleep is a medical matter on its own. Say it plainly to a doctor this month. That is not instead of God and it is not a smaller answer. And if the winter has gone somewhere darker than uneasy, tell somebody this week: a friend, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is me refusing to leave you at that back door on your own.