The Stories He Grew Up With

Keone is forty-four and he had a bad night in February and the trouble is that he cannot tell what kind of bad night it was.

He grew up in a house where certain things were said about the dark. Not systematically. Nobody sat him down. It was the way his grandmother spoke about a particular stretch of road, and something an uncle said once at a funeral, and a thing his mother did with the light in the hall that she never explained, and about nine hundred small remarks over eighteen years, all delivered half in earnest, in the voice people use for something they half believe.

He left all that behind, more or less, at about twenty. He has a mortgage and a job and two kids and he has not thought about any of it in decades.

Then February.

I am not going to describe February. I want to be plain about why. I was not in that house. Nobody who writes on the internet was in that house. And the surest way for a man in Keone's position to be harmed is a stranger deciding, at a distance and with total confidence, what was in the room.

So: he had a bad night, and he woke frightened, and here is the specific thing that has been eating him since. He does not know how much of what he felt was the night and how much was his grandmother.

He cannot separate them. He has tried. He lies there and runs the two apart and they will not come apart, and by four in the morning he is not frightened of the room anymore, he is frightened of not being able to tell.

Here is the evening it caught.

His wife, who is from somewhere else entirely and did not grow up with any of it, said, apropos of nothing, "Did your family believe all that stuff, or was it just something they said?"

And Keone opened his mouth and found that after forty-four years he genuinely did not know the answer.

You know this. Something you were raised on, half-serious, never examined, and then one bad night arrives and you cannot tell where the childhood ends and the actual fear begins, and the not being able to tell is worse than either.

A comparison, not an inventory

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 for you. I am not going to tell you which of them were true and which were not, and I am not going to name anything or describe anything or hand you a category to file February under. I am not going to teach you a technique, a prayer for the house, or any procedure at all.

And I am not going to leave you more afraid than you felt when this page opened. If you finish it more worried about the dark, or more worried about your own family, I have failed at the only thing this article is for.

What I am going to do is show you the shape of one sentence, because the shape is the answer.

Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world.1 John 4:4

Notice what that verse is. It is a comparison. Not an inventory.

John does not tell them what is in the world. He does not describe it, categorize it, rank it or explain it. He puts one word against everything else in the sentence: greater.

And the comparison is not close. He is not saying stronger by a margin. The Greek is a plain comparative, and the whole sentence is built to make the second half unimportant. That is the point of the construction. Whatever is out there is deliberately left undescribed, because describing it would give it a size, and giving it a size is exactly what John is refusing to do.

You are in a comparison that has already been settled, and the other side of it has deliberately been left undescribed. 1 John 4:4 names one word, greater, and refuses to inventory anything, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that refusal off the page and into a house at four in the morning.

And look at where He is. Greater is he that is in you. Not near you. Not above you. In. The comparison is between something that is in the world and Somebody who has taken up residence.

You have Somebody living in you who does not have to be summoned, and the verse locates Him inside rather than at a distance. It is written that greater is He that is in you, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an ancient indwelling a present fact at four in the morning.

You are not required to sort it out

Now here is the part I most want you to have, and it has nothing to do with what was in the room.

Keone has been trying to complete an audit. Which of the nine hundred remarks were true. What his grandmother actually believed. How much of February was inherited and how much was his.

That audit is not possible. His grandmother is dead. The uncle is dead. Nobody wrote anything down. And even if they were all alive and available, they were half-serious people saying half-serious things over eighteen years, and there is no answer to be found because there was never a settled position to find.

You have been asked to complete something that has no completion available, and there is nothing in Scripture that requires it. 1 John 4:4 settles the question of size without settling a single question of detail, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an unfinished audit safe to abandon.

And here is why this matters more than it looks. The audit is the thing keeping you awake. Not the room. By four in the morning Keone is not frightened of anything in the house; he is frightened of his own inability to sort the file.

You can put the file down. Not because the questions are silly. Because the verse does not run on them. Greater does not require you to know the size of the other thing. It is greater regardless of what you conclude about your grandmother.

You are covered without having to categorize anything, and the whole construction of the verse is designed to make the details unnecessary. 1 John 4:4 leaves the other side undescribed on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an undescribed thing genuinely smaller rather than merely unexamined.

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 months of broken sleep is a medical matter in its own right. Tell a doctor plainly this month. That is not instead of God and it is not a smaller answer. And if the nights have gone somewhere darker than uneasy, tell somebody this week: your wife, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is me refusing to leave you awake at four in the morning on your own.