Eleven Quiet Months

The chairs are his. He set out sixty at half past five, four blocks of fifteen, aisles wide enough for a walker, and he will stack them again at nine.

Friday night in the fellowship hall. The coffee urn ticks and knocks on the trestle table at the back beside a paper plate of cookies somebody's wife sent. Fluorescent light, a buzz off the middle panel that nobody has fixed in four years. Forty two people, which is good for a Friday.

And the microphone is coming down the row.

It is a good night. That is the thing he would want understood: he is not sitting there resenting anybody. The young man three rows up tells about the county jail and the phone call, and he means every word of it. The woman in the blue sweater tells about the hospital parking lot and the exact hour, three fifteen in the morning, and there is not a person in the hall who is not glad. He is glad. He set out the chair she is sitting in.

But everybody has an hour, and he does not have one.

He came in at twenty two. That is the closest he can get. It started, if it started anywhere, the October a coworker named Ray asked him to help move a couch and then would not stop talking on the drive back. It was somewhere in there for eleven months, and by the following September he noticed he had been praying in his truck at lunch for a while, the way a man notices he has been humming. No floor. No hour. No phone call. Eleven quiet months with nothing in them that would hold a microphone for ninety seconds.

The microphone is four rows away. He stands up, quietly, the way a man stands who has done this before, and goes back to the urn and starts refilling it, which needs doing anyway, and by the time he sits down it has gone the other way.

Nine years he has set out these chairs. He has never once spoken into that microphone.

You know the row. Yours might be a small group, or a testimony night, or a form with a line on it for the date. And you know the arithmetic you run while somebody else is talking, and the thing you have quietly concluded about yourself because your part has no hour in it.

The seed a man sleeps through

Jesus told a parable that almost nobody preaches, and He told it about this exact problem. Four verses, sitting in the middle of Mark 4 with the loud ones on either side of it.

So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; And should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how.Mark 4:26-27

Read the last phrase again. He knoweth not how. That is not a farmer failing at farming. That is Jesus describing how the kingdom of God comes into a person, and He puts the not knowing right in the middle of the sentence, on purpose, as a feature of the thing rather than a defect in the man.

The farmer does something real. He casts the seed. Then he sleeps and rises, night and day, which is the least dramatic line in the gospel, and while he does that the work goes on underground and it is not his work. When he wakes there is a blade where there was dirt, and he cannot tell you the hour it broke the surface, and nobody has ever suggested that makes the field a fraud.

You are looking at a kingdom that arrives the way Jesus said it arrives, and He said a man sleeps through it. Mark 4:27 is His sentence and not my consolation, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the growing underground, in the dark, where nobody schedules Him and nobody watches Him work.

He used one other picture for it, the one He gave a teacher of Israel at night: the wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it goes.

You have never been asked for a timestamp, and Scripture never took one. John 3:8 puts the not knowing in the sentence and Mark 4 puts it in the parable, and it is the Spirit of God, not a date, who does the thing both pictures were given to describe.

First the blade, then the ear

For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.Mark 4:28

Three stages, and any farmer will tell you not one of them has a boundary. There is no morning on which the blade becomes the ear. There is no hour a man could stand in the field with a clipboard and mark the transition. And yet by August there is corn, and the corn is not less corn for having arrived without an announcement.

Notice also what the verse does not do. It does not rank the fields. It does not say a stalk that came up in a week is more of a stalk than one that took the whole season. The text is interested in two things only: that it grew, and who grew it.

You are not standing in a smaller field because your season had no thunderstorm in it. Mark 4:28 gives one order for every stalk in the ground, and the Spirit who brought the blade up is the same Spirit over the fast row and the slow row alike.

Let me say a word for the loud stories, because I am not building anything at their expense. The man who tells about the jail is telling the truth, God did that, and it should be told in that hall with the microphone on. But listen to what he is actually testifying to. He is not testifying to the size of the crash. He is testifying that God came. The crash is the setting. God is the content.

You have the same God in your eleven months that he has in his one night, and He is not a different God at a different speed. His word calls it one kingdom and one Spirit, and it is the Spirit of God who is the actor in both accounts, which is why one of them is not a lesser edition of the other.

The deed and the record of it

I keep records for a living, so let me put this the way it lies in my hands. A deed and the record of a deed are two different objects. The deed is what was done. The record is a copy, made afterward, by somebody, for a purpose. A record can be thin. A record can be lost in a flood. Its thinness is never an argument about the deed.

A testimony is a record. It is a good thing and the room is right to want it. But a record is written by a witness, and a witness can only set down what he saw, and what this man saw of eleven months is a couch, a coworker who would not stop talking, and a lunch hour in a truck. That is a thin record of a real work.

Here is where I will not go, and I want you to hear me refuse it. I am not going to send you back through those months hunting for the moment so you can produce it for the row. That errand is the same errand in a different coat, and it puts a man back in the audit he has been in for nine years.

You are not the archivist of this and you were never appointed to be. It is written that the birth is of God and not of the will of man, and the Spirit who blows where He wishes was never waiting on a page in your handwriting.