Notes For A Room You Wished For

Wendell has been preparing for about eleven years for a room that has never once walked in.

He would not have put it that way until his daughter said something at a table, offhand, that he has not been able to shake.

She had picked up his notes, which he leaves about, and read a page, and said: who is this for?

She did not mean it critically. She was interested. And Wendell started to answer and found that the honest answer was: somebody who has read the same three things I have and wants to argue about the fourth.

Nobody in that room has read those three things. He knows that. He has known it for eleven years, and he likes the people in that room a great deal, and about four of them have been coming since the beginning.

But the notes are not for them.

The notes are for a room that would follow him at pace, that would catch the reference, that would push back on the second point so he could get to the third. He can picture that room. He has never taught it.

And here is the thing he could not explain to his daughter, and which took him a fortnight to be able to say to himself.

He is not preparing for the room he wants because he thinks the real one is stupid. That is not it at all, and he would fight anybody who suggested it.

He prepares for the imaginary room because preparing for it is the best part of his week.

You have your own version. There is a level you prepare at, and there is a room you actually stand in front of, and the gap between them is where a great deal of your enjoyment lives.

Nobody here is going to tell you to prepare less well. That would be a terrible instruction and it is not what this is.

But there is a sentence of Jesus about material He had and did not give, and the reason He gives is worth sitting with.

He had more and He held it back

There is a line in John where Jesus says something that would be alarming from anybody else.

I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.John 16:12

He has more. He says so plainly. There is material, it is true, it is His, and He is not going to deliver it.

And the reason is not that it is too advanced, exactly, and it is certainly not that they are stupid. Ye cannot bear them now. It is about capacity in a moment, and now is the load-bearing word, because it implies a later when they can.

Notice what He does not do. He does not deliver it anyway and hope. He does not deliver a simplified version. He holds it, entirely, and says out loud that He is holding it, and the next verse says the Spirit will guide them into it when the time comes.

That is restraint as an act of love rather than as a reduction of content, and it is done by the one person who could have taught anybody anything.

And holding something back can be the work rather than a failure of nerve. That is not my softening: the written word has Him with more to say and declining to say it for the sake of the hearers, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man who has been preparing for eleven years at a level nobody has ever needed.

And nothing in that verse suggests the material was wrong. He says many things to say, and they are real and He will say them later through the Spirit, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a matter of timing rather than of value.

What the imaginary room is actually for

Here is the part that is worth being honest about, and it is not a criticism.

The imaginary room is where Wendell gets fed.

That is the mechanism. He has been teaching for eleven years in a setting that takes a great deal out of him and puts very little of a particular kind back, and preparing at a level nobody needs is how he keeps his own mind alive.

That is not vanity and it is not contempt. It is a man solving a real problem in the only way available to him, and it has probably kept him going.

But it means his preparation is doing two jobs at once, and only one of them is about the room.

And your own feeding is not a guilty secret. The word says the laborer is worthy of his hire, and the Spirit is the one who lets a person acknowledge that they need something without treating the need as self-indulgence.

And the two jobs can be separated. The word says study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, and unto God locates part of the study somewhere other than in the room, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a legitimate second purpose rather than a rationalization.

Nobody is telling you to prepare down

I want that plain, because this is where a message like this ruins a good teacher.

Do not go and prepare at a lower level. The depth is not the problem, and a man who deliberately gets shallower in order to serve a room will be worse for that room within a term, because the shallowness will show up as a lack of authority rather than as accessibility.

And do not stop the reading that feeds you. If preparing at that level is what keeps you alive, then it is doing something necessary, and taking it away in the name of the room will produce a tired man teaching plainly, which is not what anybody wants.

The change is smaller. It is that the preparation can keep doing both jobs, and the delivery can be aimed at one.

Which means: prepare exactly as you do. And then, before you go in, ask what these particular people can bear now, and cut accordingly, knowing that what you cut is not lost, because you have it and they will need it in a year.

And you have what it takes to know what they can bear. The word says the Spirit will guide you into all truth, and the guiding is His work in them as well as in you, and He is the one who does the timing.