One Sentence Shorter

There are eleven people in Ruth's front room and she is nine minutes into the best thing she has ever prepared.

It is genuinely good. That is what makes this hard to write. She has been up to her elbows in this passage for three weeks. She has read four commentaries and she has checked what the word actually carries in the original and she has found the thread that runs from the first chapter to the last, and when she found it on Tuesday night at the kitchen table she sat back in the chair and laughed out loud on her own, because it was beautiful, and because it was true, and because nobody had ever shown it to her and now she gets to show it to them.

So she is nine minutes in, and she is doing it well. Her notes are good. Her order is good.

And she looks up at the third row, which in a front room means the two chairs dragged in from the kitchen, and she sees Barry.

Barry has come every week for two years and says almost nothing. He is holding his mug at chest height with both hands, which is what he does, and he is looking at the carpet about four feet in front of him, and his face has gone somewhere else entirely.

Ruth knows that face. She has seen it on people at the far end of a hard season, and she has seen it on her own father, and once she has seen it she cannot un-see it.

And she is nine minutes into the thread.

She keeps going, because what else do you do. She gets to the part she has been most looking forward to, the sentence she wrote out twice to get the rhythm right, and she says it, and it lands beautifully with the two people who were already leaning in, and Barry is still looking at the carpet.

Afterwards, when the chairs are going back and the mugs are in the sink, Barry stands at the door with his coat half on, the way men do, and he says, not really looking at her, can I ask you something daft.

And what he asks has nothing to do with the passage.

He asks whether God gets tired of the same person coming back with the same thing.

And Ruth stands in her own hallway with a tea towel over her shoulder and realizes that the answer to that question was in her notes tonight. It was right there. It was, in fact, the whole point of the passage.

It was just eleven minutes further in than Barry could get.

Keep every hour of it and turn it four degrees

Now hear me carefully, because there is a cheap version of this message and I will not write it.

I am not telling you to study less. I am not telling you that depth is showing off or that the commentaries were a waste of three weeks or that a person who loves the material has a problem. That is a lazy correction and it is not true, and every teacher who has ever been handed it has come away smaller and less useful.

Ruth's three weeks were not the problem. Ruth's three weeks are the reason she had anything worth saying at all. You cannot make a thing plain that you do not understand. Plainness is downstream of depth, always, and shallow teaching is not simple, it is just thin, and people can tell.

So keep the hours. Keep the commentaries. Keep the word study.

Turn them four degrees.

And nothing here asks you to know less. The word has them reading distinctly and giving the sense, which is more work rather than less of it, and the Spirit is the one who lets a person hold real depth and plain speech in the same hand instead of trading one away.

Because look at the oldest description we have of somebody doing this job, and notice the shape of the sentence.

And they read from the book, from the law of God, making it clear, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood what was read.Nehemiah 8:8

Three movements, and the whole weight of the sentence sits on the last one.

They read it. They made it clear. And then the sentence does not stop with the reader, and it does not stop with the clarity. It travels all the way across the square and lands in somebody standing in the crowd with the sun coming up, and it does not finish until that person has understood.

The job was not finished when it was accurate. The job was finished when it arrived.

And you were given this to carry it all the way there. The word ends that sentence in the people understanding rather than in the reading being correct, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that a direction rather than a rebuke to a woman nine minutes into three good weeks.

That is the whole correction, and it does not cost you a single one of your three weeks. It only asks a different question at the end of the preparation. Not is this right, which you already know, and not is this good, which it probably is.

Has this got to Barry.

And here is the part that stings a little, and I say it as one who has done it. The sentence I am most looking forward to saying is almost never the sentence they most need to hear. It is the sentence that most rewards the work I did. Those two things are related and they are not the same thing, and I have preached the second one dressed as the first more times than I would like to count.