Saying It To The One Who Gave You Your Start

He was twenty three and nobody would have him, and there was one man who said yes.

That is the whole of it and it explains everything else. He was young and awkward and had a way of speaking that put people off, and he had been turned down twice, and this man took him on and gave him three years of the kind of attention that shapes a person permanently. He learned to visit from him. He learned what to do in a house where somebody has just died. He learned to keep his mouth shut in a meeting until he had understood the room, which took about eighteen months and one embarrassing evening he still thinks about.

He is forty five now. That man is seventy one and still going, still leading, still in the same place.

And there is something he needs to say to him.

It is not a betrayal and it is not a criticism of the man's character, and it is not about anything hidden. It is about something in that ministry now, in this decade, which was right when it was set up and is not right any more, and which everybody under seventy in that building can see and nobody will mention.

He is the obvious person to say it. Everybody knows that too. There have been about four conversations in the last year where somebody has said, in the careful way people do, that he is the only one that man would hear it from.

And he cannot do it, and the reason is not fear of the man, who is gentle and has never once been sharp with him.

The reason is the debt.

Every time he gets near it, a sentence arrives fully formed: he gave you everything and this is what you do. And it is not the man's voice. That man has never said anything remotely like it and would be appalled to know it was in the room. It is his own voice, and it has been running for twenty two years, and it is made entirely out of gratitude, which is why he cannot argue with it.

The most awkward paragraph in the letters

There is a passage in Galatians that people skate over because it is uncomfortable, and it is uncomfortable for exactly the reason you need it.

But when Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed.Galatians 2:11

Look at the two men in that sentence.

Peter is the senior figure of the entire movement. He walked with Jesus. He preached at Pentecost. He is, by every measure anybody in that world would have used, the elder.

Paul is the one who came late, whose reputation was terrible, who had to be vouched for by Barnabas before anybody in Jerusalem would sit in a room with him. He owed his standing, humanly speaking, to other people's willingness to take a risk on him.

And Paul says a true thing to Peter's face in front of everybody, and then writes it down in a public letter years later.

Now hold that against your kitchen. Hear this: gratitude does not disqualify you from speech. That is not my opinion about your situation; it is what His word records happening between two men in exactly that relation, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes an awkward paragraph and makes it breathable for a man who has been silent for a year.

And now the part that is easy to miss, and it is the part that will do you the most good.

Read what Peter wrote about Paul afterwards. In his own letter, years later, he calls him our beloved brother Paul, and speaks of his letters as Scripture. There is not a word of grievance in it anywhere.

Which tells you something that almost nobody says out loud about that famous confrontation: it did not end the relationship. The two of them come out of it still in the same movement, still recognizing each other, and the man who was corrected went on to describe the man who corrected him with affection.

That is not a promise about your seventy one year old. I do not know that man and I am not going to guess at him. It is simply a record that the thing you are certain would break is not, in the one clear case Scripture gives us, what broke. It is the Holy Spirit, not this page, who carries a sentence like that out of its own century and sets it down where you are standing.

And let me say plainly what this message is not doing.

I am not telling you to have the conversation. It is not this article's business, and there is no line coming where your silence turns into cowardice or disobedience, and you may carry this for another five years and be entirely right with God.

What I am taking off you is the sentence that arrives fully formed.

He gave you everything and this is what you do. That sentence has a hidden claim in it, and the claim is that the debt purchased your silence. It did not. He gave you three years of shaping and you have given twenty two years of honor, and neither of those transactions included a clause about what you are permitted to say to him in his seventies.

You are not being disloyal. Scripture never once treats honor as an agreement to withhold truth, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who has been reciting your debt back at you every time you get near this.