Three Letters a Night

The house is quiet at nine forty and the only light on downstairs is the one over the stove.

The notebook is a fifty cent composition book with a marbled cover, and he is nineteen pages into it. Three letters a night, twenty times each, in rows, the way a boy would. He is fifty. The letters come out square and slightly too large in a machinist's hand, and he does not care, because the point is not that they look good.

The church took in a family in March, and he is the one on the schedule who drives them to appointments, because his shift ends at three and nobody else's does. He can say hello and thank you and the name of the youngest boy. What he could not do, that first month, was read a single word on the papers they handed him at the clinic. He sat in that waiting room holding a page he could not begin, and something in him went quiet and decided.

So: three letters a night. Then he tears a strip off the bottom of the page, writes the three on it, and tapes it inside the cabinet door above the toaster, where he will see it four times tomorrow. There are strips going back to April in there now, overlapping like shingles.

He is unbelievably patient with this. If he gets one wrong he does it again. If he forgets one from two weeks ago he concludes nothing about himself; he just puts it back in tomorrow's three. He would tell you this is the only way anybody has ever learned anything.

Then he closes the notebook and sits there with the glass of milk, and the clock on the stove says nine fifty two, and he does the other arithmetic.

Eleven years since he came to faith. And this morning on the interstate he said a thing to a man in a truck that he would not want repeated, and he still cannot pray for more than about four minutes before his mind is on a valve stem, and there is a study on Wednesdays he has quit twice. Eleven years and not much further along than he was, and he tells himself the word for what he needs is discipline, and he means it the way a man means a hammer.

Three letters a night for a foreign alphabet. A deadline for his own soul. Same table, same man, same hour, and he has never once noticed he is running two different standards.

You know that table. Yours might be a language, or a bad knee, or a trade you took up at forty, something you are patient with in a way you would never be patient with yourself. And you know the arithmetic, and you know what you call it when you do it.

The sneer that became the method

There is a line in Isaiah that gets stitched on things, and almost nobody knows how it entered the book, and the way it entered is the whole reason it can carry your weight.

For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little.Isaiah 28:10

That is not the prophet's phrase first. It is a mockery of him. The men he was sent to were making fun of the way he taught, in a singsong, the way you would mimic somebody talking to a toddler: a rule, a rule, a little here, a little there. Who did he think he was teaching, weaned children? They had a rate they considered proper for grown men, Isaiah was under it, and they let him know.

And the Lord takes the sneer and keeps it. It goes into the record in the mouths of the men who meant it as contempt, and it stands there to this day as the truest description in Scripture of how a person is actually fed.

You are being taught by a God who was mocked for the pace He uses, and He did not change it afterward. Isaiah 28:10 sits in the book in the mockers' own words, and the Spirit of God saw to it that they stayed there, which is not what a teacher does with an insult He is ashamed of.

That matters at that table, because the voice doing your arithmetic at nine fifty two has the same accent as the men in Isaiah. It has a rate it considers proper. It is not quoting the book at you. The book is on the other side.

You have never been handed a schedule by God, and you were never behind on one. His word gives a direction and a diet and never once prints a timetable, and it is the Holy Spirit who feeds a person here a little and there a little, at a pace He is not embarrassed by.

Two standards at one table

Watch what he does with the alphabet, because he already knows everything I am trying to tell him.

He does not test his fluency at the end of each night. He does not sit there asking whether nineteen pages was enough by now, whether a serious man would be reading whole sentences by August, whether still mixing up two of the letters means the project is a pretense. He does three, tapes the strip inside the cabinet, and goes to bed. That is not laziness. That is how a grown man treats something he actually intends to learn.

Then he closes the book and turns on himself an instrument he would never use on the notebook.

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

Look at what the verse assigns and what it does not. It assigns an appetite and a diet. Desire the milk. Grow thereby. There is no rate in it, no by this age, no should be past this. The growing happens thereby, by the milk, which is another way of saying it happens to the one who eats and not by the one who tries.

You are told what to want and what to take, and the growing was never on your side of the ledger. 1 Peter 2:2 hands a man an appetite and hands God the increase, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes the word taste like food to somebody who used to find it dry.

So the ruler he is holding at nine fifty two is made of real numbers, and it is not from the book. He built it. Most of us build one, out of somebody else's testimony, a paperback about ninety days, and one sermon heard in a hard year, and then we hold it up in a dark kitchen and read off a verdict.

You were never given that ruler, and you are free to set it on the table and leave it there. Scripture says here a little and there a little, and it is the Spirit of God, not a measuring stick a tired man made at midnight, who is doing the actual work in him.

What a fed thing does

Nobody grows by trying to grow. Say it about a body and it is obvious. A boy does not add an inch by concentrating. He eats, he sleeps, he runs around, and the inch happens to him.

The new birth put a person into a fed life, and feeding is daily and ordinary and mostly does not feel like anything while it is happening. Bread does not announce itself going down.

Which is why the man with the notebook is closer to right than he knows. Three letters, twenty times each, tape it in the cabinet. Not because small is all he can manage, but because here a little is not a concession made to slow people. It is the method, and it always was, and the fast people are using it too, they just have not noticed.

You are being fed by someone who never once asked you to also be the one growing. His word puts the increase in God's hands, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing that increasing in a man who is asleep by ten thirty with the light over the stove still on.

And I will not promise you the pace picks up. I do not know that, and a man who has kept nineteen pages of a marbled notebook would hear the sales pitch in it. What He does in you and when is His, done His way, on His clock.

You have a today's portion, and it is enough for a today. Scripture gives the manna one morning at a time and never a week ahead, and it is His Spirit who makes an ordinary evening portion sit in a man and do something.