Two Years Of Setting It Down

He has picked it up eleven times that he can remember and there were probably others.

The first time was in a barn, actually, in the autumn two years ago, with a man he has known thirty years, and he got as far as clearing his throat and then somebody came through the door with a question about a gate.

The second time was in a hospital car park in January and it was the wrong place and he knew it as he opened his mouth.

The third time he had it written down, on a card, in his own writing, and he had it in his shirt pocket at a meeting and never took it out because the meeting went somewhere else entirely and by half past nine there was no version of the evening where it would have made sense.

He can list them. That is the trouble. If he could not list them he could accuse himself cleanly of cowardice and get on with it, but every single one has a specific and honest reason attached, and none of the reasons was invented afterwards.

And it has now been two years.

Here is what has happened to him in those two years, and it is the actual injury and it has very little to do with the word itself. He has stopped being able to believe his own reasons. Each one of them, examined on its own, holds up. Eleven of them in a row start to look like a pattern, and a pattern looks like a character, and a character is a thing a man cannot put down.

So the word is heavy, and it is now the second heaviest thing he is carrying. The heaviest is the two years.

He is sixty one, and he has been doing this a long time, and he was never a man who ducked things. Ask anybody. And he lies awake wondering whether the version of himself he has believed in since he was thirty is still accurate, or whether he is simply a man who has become careful and has kept the old name.

A word in season, and a waking every morning

There is a line in Isaiah about speech that is nearly always read as being about eloquence, and it is not about eloquence at all. It is about timing and about who wakes a man up.

The Lord GOD hath given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary: he wakeneth morning by morning, he wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learned.Isaiah 50:4

Take the two halves separately.

The first half: a word in season. That is a farming phrase and you will feel it before you think about it. It says plainly that words have seasons, and that the skill being described is not the ability to say a thing but the ability to know when. Which means there is such a category as the wrong month, and Scripture takes it for granted.

The second half: he wakeneth morning by morning. Not once. Not at ordination. Every morning, the same waking, the same opening of an ear, which is a description of a man who receives his instructions daily and does not hold a standing order.

So hear this, in a barn doorway with a flask in your hand: two years of not yet is not two years of failure. That is not my leniency; it is what His word assumes about seasons and about a waking that has to happen again every single morning, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes an old farming phrase and puts it under a man who has been calling himself something at three in the morning.

Now let me get at the pattern, because that is the thing eating you and it can be looked at squarely.

Eleven honest reasons in a row do not add up to cowardice. They add up to eleven. Arithmetic is not the same as evidence, and a man who can name a real reason for each occasion is not a man producing excuses, he is a man reporting what happened.

And here is the thing you have not weighed, because you cannot see it from inside. A coward does not keep picking it up. That is the tell, and it is the only one that matters. Eleven times you have carried that word into a room ready to say it. A frightened man avoids the rooms. You have walked into every single one of them with it in your pocket.

You are not a man who has become careful and kept the old name. Scripture never once treats a delayed word as a forfeited one, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who has been running your character through a mill since the barn.

And I am not going to tell you to say it. Not this month and not at all. That is between you and God and it belongs in a room I have never stood in, and there is no line coming where your silence becomes disobedience.

What I will tell you is that the ear is opened morning by morning. Which means the two years are not a closed file with your name on it. It means tomorrow morning is its own morning, and it comes with its own waking, and the man being woken is not obliged to carry eleven previous ones into it.