The Keys in the Bathroom

Colin’s dad, who I was married to at the time, asked me if I knew where the keys were. I realize it’s an ordinary question that passes between two people who share a home a hundred times a year. But I remember this instance with unusual clarity, which is itself a small irony given where the story goes.

It was a season when I was juggling more than usual, working hard to sharpen my systems, to be efficient, to hold all the moving pieces of a full life without dropping any. I was a newly minted pharmacist, and I took real pride in being capable: bright, quick, on top of things. Competence was part of how I understood myself. So when he asked about the keys, I searched my memory and answered with confidence: the kitchen. I’d put them in the kitchen.

He went to look. They weren’t there.

And then he accused me of lying.

That accusation landed somewhere deep and old in me, because I knew….I knew….I had put them in the kitchen. My intent had never been to deceive; the very charge felt foreign to who I was. And so I did the only thing that made sense: I trusted my memory.

What else did I have? A ghost hadn’t moved them. So I doubled down. I told him to look again, put the ball back in his court. Maybe they’d slid down the counter. Maybe they’d fallen behind something. He looked again. Not there. And again he asked, more pointedly this time, whether I was deceiving him on purpose.

Now I was in a genuinely difficult position, defending the reliability of my own mind against mounting evidence. When I got home, I went to the kitchen myself, half in disbelief that they could actually be absent.

And they were. He’d been right.

I scoured the house, growing more unsettled with each empty surface…. and finally found them in the bathroom. Where I had set them down right before leaving. Which I only barely remembered, if I remembered it at all, the recollection surfacing faint and uncertain like something dredged from deep water.

I had been certain. And I had been wrong. And the gap between those two facts deeply troubles me.

Why? Because we build our lives on the assumption that we can trust what we know.

Memory is the ground we stand on. It tells us who we are, what happened, what was said, what we did and didn’t do. We rely on it the way we rely on the floor, without thinking, until the moment it gives way.

But the keys taught me that the floor is not as solid as it feels. My memory had produced certainty. Not vagueness, not a guess, but the confident sensation of knowing…..and that certainty was simply false. The feeling of remembering and the fact of what happened had come apart, and I couldn’t tell from the inside that they had. The experience of being sure is not the same as being right, and there is no internal alarm that distinguishes them.

This is more than a marital misunderstanding. It cracks something open. Because if my certainty can be counterfeit, if the very sensation of knowing can attach itself to something untrue, how much of what I carry as settled fact is actually reliable?

The rift through this example is a small version of a rift that runs through all human relationship: we trust our own accounts, other people trust theirs, and when they conflict, each of us defends the one thing we feel we cannot doubt, which is our own memory. And sometimes we are all sincerely, confidently wrong.

Follow the thread far enough and it becomes vertiginous.

If nothing I remember is fully trustworthy, how can I speak with certainty about anything at all? Is there a threshold below which knowledge collapses into mere assumption?

Scripture is not naive about this. It is, in fact, remarkably honest regarding the limits of human knowing. Paul writes that now we see through a glass, now we know in part (1 Corinthians 13:12). The Greek image is of a dim, imperfect reflection, a polished metal mirror that gives back a blurred and partial likeness. Paul, the most formidable mind in the New Testament, does not claim clear sight. He claims a squint. And Isaiah records God saying, my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways (Isaiah 55:8-9), placing an unbridgeable gap between divine knowing and ours. The Bible never flatters human certainty. It consistently locates true knowledge in God and grants us only fragments.

This could tip into despair. Particularly a paralysis where, unable to fully trust anything, we conclude we can know nothing.

The book of Ecclesiastes flirts with exactly this. The Preacher looks at all his knowledge and wisdom and calls it vanity, a chasing after wind, concluding that in much wisdom is much grief (Ecclesiastes 1:18). There is a version of this reckoning that leads straight into the fog and never comes out.

But Scripture refuses to end there, and the refusal is instructive. The limits of human knowing are not presented as grounds for despair but as grounds for humility—and, strangely, as grounds for a different kind of confidence altogether.

So here is where I’ve had to make a distinction I didn’t have language for before the keys.

There is certainty grounded in my own cognitive reliability. That is, in the trustworthiness of my memory, my perception, my reasoning. And the keys demonstrated that this certainty is fragile. It can be confidently, sincerely false. If my faith rested on this kind of certainty….on my ability to reason my way to God flawlessly, to remember every spiritual experience accurately, to trust the unbroken competence of my own mind….it would rest on sand.

But there is another kind of certainty, grounded not in the reliability of the one who knows but in the reliability of the One who is known.

Paul, in the same breath where he admits he sees dimly, says something else: then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known (1 Corinthians 13:12). The anchor is not my knowing. It’s God’s knowing of me. I may misplace the keys of my own memory, but I am not myself misplaced. He knows exactly where I am, even when I don’t.

This is the thread that runs through the whole of Scripture’s treatment of the problem. When Paul says I know whom I have believed (2 Timothy 1:12), the object of his certainty is a Person, not a proposition he’s reasoned his way to. He isn’t certain because his mind is flawless. He’s certain because the One he trusts is faithful. Faith, in the biblical sense, was never confidence in the reliability of my own cognition. It was trust in the reliability of God’s character. And those are very different foundations: one of them cracks when I misremember the keys, and the other doesn’t.

Still, the honest question presses: how flawed is our memory, and what does that mean for a faith built partly on remembering?

Because Scripture commands remembering constantly. Remember the Sabbath (Exodus 20:8). Remember that you were slaves in Egypt (Deuteronomy 5:15). Do this in remembrance of me (Luke 22:19). The life of faith is drenched in the imperative to recall—to hold onto what God has done, to build memorials, to tell the next generation. If human memory is as unreliable as the keys suggest, what happens to a faith so dependent on it?

I think the answer is subtle, and it reframes the whole worry. God, knowing our memory is frail, did not leave remembering to us alone. This is precisely why He commanded the memorials, the feasts, the written word, the communal retelling. Israel piled stones at the Jordan so that when children asked what do these stones mean?, the story could be told again (Joshua 4:6-7). The remembering was made external, communal, physical, repeated—precisely because internal, private memory couldn’t be trusted to carry it alone. God built scaffolding around our forgetting. The Lord’s Supper is bread and cup we can hold, not a memory we must summon unaided. He knew we’d misplace the keys, so He gave us landmarks that don’t move.

And more than that: the Spirit Himself is given as the one who will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you (John 14:26). The remembering of faith, at its deepest, is not finally my achievement but God’s work in me. My memory fails; His does not. The keys can vanish from my recollection, but I have not vanished from His.

So where does the wrestling leave me? Not in despair, but not in false confidence either.

The keys taught me to hold my own certainties more loosely: to remember that the feeling of being right is not proof of being right, and that this humility is not weakness but accuracy. When I clash with someone over what happened, I can no longer assume my account is the reliable one simply because it feels certain. That’s worth carrying into every relationship, and it would have served that marriage better had I learned it sooner.

But the same lesson that humbles my confidence in myself redirects my confidence toward its proper object. I don’t need my memory to be flawless, because my faith was never meant to rest on my memory. It rests on the faithfulness of a God who knows fully what I know only in part, who holds the account I keep losing, who built remembrance into stone and bread and Spirit precisely because He knew I’d need help remembering.

We see through a glass, darkly,But the dimness of the mirror is not the end of the matter. There is One on the other side of the glass who sees clearly, who is not squinting, who knows me fully even as I fumble to know anything at all.

The keys were in the bathroom the whole time. I had simply forgotten. And the comfort I’ve found through these kinds of things is not that I’ll someday remember everything perfectly, but that I am fully known by the One who never forgets where I am….. even when I can’t remember where I’ve been.