The Address He Kept Getting Wrong

He was nine and the form said Home Address and he wrote the one he could remember, and it was wrong, and it was wrong because they had moved eleven days earlier and nobody had said the new one out loud in front of him.

That happened again about a year later at a different school. He wrote a street he had lived on before, because it was the street he could picture, and the teacher looked at it and said, not unkindly, is that right, and he said yes, and it was not.

He is forty-six now and he could not tell you why that comes back to him more than anything else from those years. It is not the worst thing that happened. It is not even a bad thing on its own terms. But it is the one that arrives, unasked, when he fills in a form, when somebody asks where he is from, once in a job interview when a man asked him a perfectly ordinary question about roots and he heard himself pause.

I want to be careful and I want to say why. There is an article available at this point that explains this man by narrating his childhood back to him and putting names to the people in it, and I am not going to write it. I do not know his family. Neither does anybody reading this, and a person's history is not a case to be tried in a paragraph by a stranger.

Here is a description instead, and it is all I will offer: a boy did not know his own address, twice, in front of somebody, and forty years later something in him still checks. That is a fact rather than a verdict, and it does not require anybody to be found guilty of it.

Set on the heights

Let me put down a line and notice the two halves of what God is described as doing.

He maketh my feet like hinds' feet, and setteth me upon my high places.Psalm 18:33

Two verbs and both are His. He makes the feet and He sets the man, and the man does neither. And the picture is deliberately specific: a deer's foot is built for uneven ground, for rock, for a place with no flat, and it is steady there not because the mountain is flat but because the foot is right for it.

Now hold that next to a boy who did not know his address. What is being offered is not a level place. It is a foot that holds on unlevel ground, which is a completely different promise and is the one that actually applies.

You are set on high ground by God, and the setting was never waiting for you to know where you lived. That is not a soft thing said to a man at a table of papers. It is what is written in Psalm 18, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written line and puts it under somebody who still pauses at a form. An address is a line on a page. The setting is God's.

And read the whole psalm and see who is speaking. It is David, at the end of a life of caves and camps and other people's cities, and the psalm is titled as being sung on the day the Lord delivered him from all his enemies. He does not celebrate by describing a house.

You have been given feet made for exactly the ground you have actually walked on. Psalm 18:33 is the written word for it, and it is the Spirit of God who makes an old song land in a classroom in the late afternoon.

Why that one comes back

Now the tender part, and I want to handle it carefully.

It is worth asking why that memory and not another, and I think the answer is simple and not psychological. A form is a place where a person is asked to state what is true about themselves, and he could not, and he was nine, and he said yes anyway.

That is not damage. It is a moment that got filed, the way one moment does when it happens to represent a larger arrangement, and the fact that it still arrives when he fills in a form is not a sign that anything is wrong with him. It is a sign that he was paying attention at nine.

And there is nobody to prosecute for it. Families that move a lot are usually families under pressure and nobody tells a nine-year-old the new address because everybody is carrying a box.

Thou hast known my soul in adversities. Thou hast not shut me up into the hand of the enemy; thou hast set my feet in a large room.Psalm 31:7-8

Set my feet in a large room. Same verb again, and this time the place has room in it.

You were known in the adversities themselves rather than after them, and the knowing did not require a correct form. Psalm 31:7 is the line it rests on, and it is His Spirit who lets a man be known without having to be able to state anything accurately about himself.

You are placed right now, on ground God set you on, whatever you would write on a line today. It is written that He makes my feet like hinds' feet and sets me on my high places, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that true in a body that has been checking since it was nine.

If any of this ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor about what comes back and when it comes back. A memory that arrives unasked for forty years responds well to real help from a real person, and being set on high places by God has never been a reason to sit with it alone.