They Needed One Sentence

The girl asked a small question and Ruth gave her about forty minutes, and the girl was very polite about it.

It happened at a kitchen table, which is where most of Ruth's teaching has happened for thirty years, and she is good at it and people ask her things because the answers are worth having.

The question was six words long. Ruth can still quote it.

And what Ruth heard in it was a doorway into something she knows well and loves, and she went through the doorway, and she took the girl with her, and about forty minutes later they were somewhere genuinely interesting and the girl said thank you and meant it and went home.

Ruth thought about it that night while she was doing the dishes.

Because the girl had asked a six word question, and six word questions are usually not doorways. They are usually exactly what they say, and the person asking has about ninety seconds of room in them, and what they need is one sentence they can carry to the car.

She had given her forty minutes of true and excellent material in answer to a question that wanted one sentence.

Now, here is what Ruth will not say and I will not say either.

The forty minutes were not worthless. That material is good and hard-won and a great deal of it will sit in that girl for years and come back up when she needs it. Nobody was harmed. It was a good evening.

It simply was not what was asked, and Ruth knew that at about minute nine and kept going.

You have your own version. Somebody asked you something small and you gave them something large, and they were gracious about it, and you have known since roughly minute nine.

Nobody here is going to tell you your material is too much. It is not, and this is not a message about knowing less.

But there is a piece of arithmetic in Corinthians that Paul does out loud, and the numbers in it are startling.

He counts, and the ratio is ten thousand to five

There is a sentence where Paul, in the middle of an argument about speaking in a church, puts an actual figure on it.

Yet in the church I had rather speak five words with my understanding, that by my voice I might teach others also, than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue.1 Corinthians 14:19

Five, against ten thousand.

He is not talking about brevity as a style. He is comparing words that reach somebody against words that do not, whatever their content, and he uses a ratio so extreme that nobody could mistake it for a preference.

And look at the clause in the middle. That by my voice I might teach others also. That is the criterion. Not accuracy, which he assumes, and not depth, which he plainly has. Whether it lands in somebody.

He is doing arithmetic that most of us have never done: he is pricing his own words by what they accomplish in a person rather than by what is in them.

And the measure was never how much true material was delivered. That is not my simplification: the written word sets five reaching words against ten thousand that do not and calls the five better, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman doing dishes at eleven at night.

And nothing in that verse devalues what you know. He says with my understanding, which is to say the five words come out of the same depth the ten thousand would have, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a matter of aim rather than of dilution.

What happened at minute nine

Here is the part worth being honest about, and it is not a fault, it is a mechanism.

At minute nine Ruth knew. She has taught for thirty years and she is not oblivious; there was a small signal in the room and she registered it.

And she kept going, and the reason is not vanity.

It is that stopping at minute nine would have required her to leave something out that was true, connected, and about to be relevant, and every teacher knows the particular discomfort of abandoning a thread that is going somewhere.

That discomfort is real and it is not selfish. It is the feeling of a person who can see a shape the other person cannot see yet, and who knows that stopping now leaves the shape incomplete.

But the girl did not need the shape. She needed a sentence.

And you are permitted to leave a thread unfinished. The word says knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth, and edifieth is a building word about the other person, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a real permission rather than a rebuke about your appetite.

And what you left out has not been wasted. The word says a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver, and fitly means suited to the moment, and the Spirit is the one who lets a person hold material until its moment rather than spending it because it is ready.

Nobody is telling you to answer everything briefly

I want that plain, because a message like this can produce somebody who has decided to be short with everybody, which is its own kind of not listening.

Some questions are doorways. Some people have three hours and want them, and cutting them off after ninety seconds because you read an article would be a worse failure than the forty minutes were.

The skill is not brevity. It is telling the difference, and the difference lives in the person and not in the question.

Ruth knew at minute nine. That is the actual finding here: not that she was wrong to start, but that she had the information nine minutes in and did not act on it.

And you already have what it takes to tell. The word says the Spirit searcheth all things, and He is given to you, and the Spirit is the one who supplies the reading of a room rather than leaving it to a skill you have to acquire.