The Thing You Would Have To Explain

Eighteen months.

And it is not the thing itself that has kept you out. You have made a kind of peace with the thing itself, in the way a person does, on and off, at three in the morning mostly.

It is the sentence.

Because if you walk into that hall on a Sunday, somebody is going to say, warmly, that they have not seen you in a while, and they will mean nothing by it, and then there will be a small gap in the conversation where an explanation is meant to go.

And you do not have one.

You have tried to build one. You have got as far as a version that is technically accurate and takes about forty seconds, and every time you rehearse it you can hear how it lands, and you can see the face it makes, and you cannot do it.

So the whole thing rests on a sentence you cannot write, and because you cannot write it, you cannot go, and it has been a year and a half.

And here is the part that has started to frighten you. You have begun to think that the not going is now its own thing that would need explaining, and that the explanation is getting longer every month, and that at some point it will be too long to say at all.

The woman at the well did the opposite of what you are doing

There is a woman in John who has a life that a whole town has opinions about, and who meets Jesus at the middle of the day at a well, which is when you go if you do not want to meet anybody. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it true in you.

And after the conversation she goes back into that town, and look at what she says.

Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?John 4:29

Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did.

She does not construct a sentence. She does not manage it, she does not soften it, she does not build a version that will land well with a town that has been talking about her for years.

She walks in and names the whole of it in one clause and moves straight past it to the thing that actually matters.

And here is the detail people miss. She uses the very fact she had been hiding as the credential. It is not despite everything she ever did; it is the thing she leads with, because it is the evidence.

So take this now, eighteen months in. You are not required to arrive with an account that satisfies anybody. The written word has a woman walking back into the worst room she knows with no sentence prepared at all, and the Holy Spirit is the one who sent her back, and nothing at that well was made conditional on her having a good explanation.

Nobody in that room is holding an examination

Now let me say the practical thing, because you are somebody who needs the mechanism and not only the comfort.

The gap in the conversation is real. It exists. Somebody will say they have not seen you in a while and there will be a two second space.

But you have been imagining that space as a hearing, and it is not one. It is a doorway. And the thing you actually need is not a forty second account, it is a four word sentence that closes the space without lying. Scripture says so plainly, and the Holy Spirit does not read it differently on a bad day.

I have been away a while. That is it.

Say it warmly, look at them, and then ask them something about themselves. The space closes, the conversation moves, and you are in.

Nobody in that hall is entitled to your eighteen months. That is not coldness; it is ordinary human dignity, and the woman at the well chose what she told and to whom, and she chose it herself.

You are received without an account. His word has her walking in with no prepared sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gave her the nerve, and there is no fee at that door and never was.

What the plain hall did about accounts

In 1895 a man named Phineas Bresee opened a hall near the middle of Los Angeles and made a rule that not one seat in it could be rented.

What the accounts of that place keep returning to is who came in, and the striking thing is not that they were poor. It is that a great many of them had things about their lives that in any other room in that city would have had to be explained before they could sit down.

That hall did not run an examination at the door, and everybody in those streets knew it, and that is why the room filled.

And here is what happened next in a lot of those stories, and it is the thing you cannot see from eighteen months out: people who came in without explaining anything ended up, months later, telling somebody the whole of it, in a kitchen, because they wanted to and not because it was the price.

That is the right order. In first. Told later, if ever, and only where it is safe.

The written word has a woman leading with the very thing she had been hiding, and the Holy Spirit is the one who arranges when a thing gets said.