Eleven Minutes

The air conditioning in this room is set for a crowd twice the size, and it is twenty to three on a Saturday afternoon.

Session three. Round tables with paper covers, three carnations in a jar, a tote bag under every chair. Her cardigan is over the back of the chair because she got warm in the second session and cold in this one. There is half a snickerdoodle on a paper plate at her elbow and a lanyard with her first name printed large and her church printed small.

The speaker is lovely. That is the thing she will keep coming back to on the drive home. The woman up front is not boasting and not performing, she is telling the room how she got through the worst year of her life, and she is a little embarrassed to be talking about herself at all. Somewhere in the middle of it she says, almost in passing, that she gets up at four forty five and is in the Word until seven, and that those two hours are the reason she is standing there at all.

The room makes a sound. Not applause. That soft collective noise a room makes when it decides something is beautiful.

And under the paper tablecloth, the woman with the cardigan on the chair starts doing arithmetic.

Eleven minutes. That is the honest number and she knows it, because she once counted. Eleven minutes on a phone app, in the car, in the school pickup line, with the engine running and the radio off, between getting there early and the doors opening. Some days seven. Some days none at all, and then a guilty forty on a Sunday to make it up, which she knows is not how any of this works. Eleven minutes against two hours. She does the division without meaning to.

She writes the number four forty five in the top corner of her notebook and draws a box around it. Then she draws a second box around the first one. Then she claps with everybody else, warmly and genuinely, because the talk was good, and the thought sitting underneath her ribs the whole time is the plain one: I am not really in this. I am adjacent to this. These are the people who are in it, and I am the one who comes to the conference.

You know the arithmetic. Yours might be a man at church who reads the Old Testament every year, or a friend whose prayer life sounds like a second job, or the plan you printed in January that stopped in Leviticus. And you know the number in the corner of the page with a box around it, and the sentence it always ends in, which you have never once said out loud to anyone in that room.

The shepherd carries the ones who cannot keep up

Let me put a picture beside that number, because the picture is in Isaiah, and it is not a picture of a training schedule.

He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young.Isaiah 40:11

Read what the shepherd in that verse is doing. Feeding. Gathering. Carrying. Gently leading. Four actions and every one of them is aimed at the animals in the flock who are least able to keep up: the lambs, who are new and small, and the ewes heavy with young, who cannot be hurried without harm. He is not pictured out in front setting a pace and looking back to see who fell behind. He is pictured with a lamb under His arm.

You are inside a flock whose speed is set by its slowest walker, and you were inside it long before you started counting minutes. That is written into Isaiah 40:11 as plainly as it can be written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a shepherd's picture from a scroll and lays it over a conference table with a paper cover, which is His ordinary work with the word.

And no verse anywhere puts a flock in order of merit. A shepherd does not run a leaderboard. He counts, and his eye is on the one at the back either way.

I will lead on softly

There is a second picture, and it is one of my favorites in all of Genesis, because it is a man saying no to a faster man.

Jacob has just come through the hardest night of his life and is walking toward a brother he has every reason to fear. Esau, generous now, offers to travel with him and set the pace. And Jacob says something that ought to be printed on the inside cover of every discipleship plan ever sold.

The children are tender, and the flocks and herds with young are with me: and if men should overdrive them one day, all the flock will die. Let my lord, I pray thee, pass over before his servant: and I will lead on softly, according as the cattle that goeth before me and the children be able to endure.Genesis 33:13-14

Overdrive them one day, and all the flock will die. That is a father who has done the math the other way around, and the conclusion he came to is that the pace belongs to the tender ones and not to the strong ones, and that a herd driven at somebody else's speed does not arrive faster. It does not arrive.

You have a God who leads on softly, at the pace of what can be endured, and it is already His custom rather than a concession made for you. It is written into the way He describes Himself, and it is His Spirit who makes an old sentence about cattle and children read like a kindness aimed straight at a woman in a cardigan on a Saturday.

So the woman at the front with her four forty five is not the standard. She is a walker in the same flock. Her two hours came out of the worst year of her life, and God met her in it at the pace she could bear. That is her mercy, not a measurement laid over anybody else's morning.

Eleven minutes is a meal

Now let me say something about the number itself, because I do not want to leave it lying there sounding small.

As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby.1 Peter 2:2

Milk, and babies, and growing thereby. Peter's picture of feeding is not a scholar at a desk. It is an infant, who takes small amounts often, cannot be argued into eating more per sitting, and grows anyway. Nobody has ever looked into a crib and said the child is not really in this family because of the size of the portions.

You have real food in front of you in eleven minutes, and it is already the same word the woman at the front is reading for two hours. Scripture calls it milk that people grow by, and the Spirit is the one who makes a few verses in a parked car do the thing that feeding does, because the nourishment was never in the length of the sitting.

And here is what I love about that pickup line. Eleven minutes with the radio off, in a stationary car, in the fifteen minutes God actually gave her in that season, is not a scrap left over from a real quiet time somewhere else. It is the real one. She has been reading it as a shortfall from a life she is not living, when it is a meal in the life she has.

You are fed by Him in the season you are actually in, and you were fed in it all the way back through the years you counted as wasted. His word says He gives food in due season, and it is the Holy Spirit, never the length of the reading, who makes what is read become anything at all.