Twenty Six Years and Nothing to Hand Over

He has been sitting in the car for eleven minutes and he has not put the key in.

The lot is nearly empty now. A boy is riding a bike in slow circles by the fence while his father talks to somebody in the doorway. His own wife is still inside, doing the thing she does where she says goodbye four times. His jacket smells like church coffee and the heater has gone cold. On the passenger seat there is a sheet of paper, folded in three, with six weeks printed down the left hand side.

The elder caught him by the coat hooks. Not a big moment. He said they were starting a class in the fall for four people who are brand new, six sessions, nothing fancy, and would he take it. And he said he would think about it, in the voice a man uses when he means no, and then he came out here and sat down and did not start the car.

Twenty six years.

He has read the Bible through twice, both times in a year he was laid up and had the hours. He cannot pray out loud in a group without his voice going somewhere he does not like. He could not tell you the difference between two of the long words the pastor uses, and he has looked them up more than once, and they do not stay. He has never taught anybody anything except how to run conduit through a stud wall, which he can do in the dark.

And underneath all of that, sitting in a cold car with a folded sheet on the seat beside him, is the thing he would never say out loud: twenty six years, and he has come up with nothing. Nothing anybody could use. He has been fed at this table for a quarter of a century and there is not one plate he could carry to anybody else.

He knows the verse, too. That is the worst of it. He has quoted it at himself for years without ever reading the paragraph it lives in.

You know the parking lot. Yours might be the sign-up sheet you walk past, or the message you did not answer, or the moment somebody said your name and you felt the whole ledger open. And you know the arithmetic underneath, the one that starts with a number of years and ends with nothing to hand over.

The verse he has been using on himself

I want to take the verse off him, look at it properly, and hand it back the right way up.

For when for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that one teach you again which be the first principles of the oracles of God; and are become such as have need of milk, and not of strong meat.Hebrews 5:12

That is a real rebuke and I am not going to sand it down. The writer is talking to a congregation that had been going backward, drifting away from what they already held, and he says so plainly. But watch what happens two verses later, because this is the part that never gets quoted in a cold car.

Strong meat belongs to those of full age, he says, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised.

By reason of use. Not talent, not vocabulary, not a good memory for long words. Use. The word behind it carries the sense of a thing worn in by handling, the way a hammer handle darkens where a hand has been for years. They did not get there by being quick. They got there by turning up and using what they had.

You are twenty six years into exactly the process that verse describes, and you were in it on every ordinary Sunday that felt like nothing. Hebrews 5:14 says the senses are exercised by reason of use, and the Spirit who moved a writer to choose the word for wear and handling rather than the word for brilliance chose it on purpose.

And notice something about the rebuke itself. It is aimed at people who were letting go of the first principles, not at people who were still holding them with both hands after a quarter of a century. A man who has stayed at the table twenty six years is not the man in that sentence. He is the man reading it as though it were addressed to him, which is a different thing entirely, and a much more common one.

You have held on to something for twenty six years, and that holding is already the thing the writer was asking for. It is written that they had need of someone to teach them the first principles again, and it is the Spirit, not the size of anybody's vocabulary, who keeps a man's hands closed on those for a quarter of a century.

What the same writer said next

Now stay on the page, because the writer of Hebrews does something in the next few paragraphs that a man in a parking lot needs to see.

He has just said the hardest thing in his letter. He has told them they ought to be teachers. And then, before the ink is dry, he turns around and says this.

For God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love, which ye have shewed toward his name, in that ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister.Hebrews 6:10

Same letter, same people, roughly the same breath. The man who said they ought to be teachers by now also said God is not unjust and has not forgotten a thing done in His name. Both sentences are true, and the second is not a consolation prize attached to the first. It is what God.s actual books say about them.

You are on a page where God is recorded as not forgetting, and it was written down about people who had just been told they were behind. Hebrews 6:10 puts the labor of love in God's ledger, and the Spirit who put it there is not keeping a shorter list in a cold car on a Sunday afternoon.

I have watched a man decide he was the weak link and then work eleven years believing it while everybody around him quietly relied on him. That is not humility. It is a wrong survey held long enough to feel like a fact, and the correction never comes from inside the man. It comes from somebody reading him the real numbers off the real document.

You have a record with God that does not match the one in your head, and His is the one that stands. Scripture says He is not unrighteous to forget, and it is His Spirit who carries that sentence into a parking lot rather than any encouragement I could offer you on my own.

Nobody hands an apprentice the roof

Here is where the trade actually helps.

I have trained apprentices. On day one you do not hand a young man the load calculations for a roof. You hand him a four foot level and you show him what plumb looks like, and you say water goes downhill and it will find every mistake you make. First principles. And the man who teaches him that does not need to be the finest engineer in the county. He needs to have used one for a long time.

Now read what the new believers class actually is. Four people who are days or weeks into this. And Peter says exactly what a newborn is supposed to be given.

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

Milk is not a failing food. In Hebrews it is a rebuke because those men should have been carrying it to others by then and were still being spoon fed themselves. In Peter it is the prescription, and the people it is prescribed for are exactly the four people who will be sitting in that room in the fall.

You have the very thing that room was opened to serve, and it is already in your hands rather than somewhere you have to go and get it. 1 Peter 2:2 calls the milk of the word the right food for a newborn, and the Spirit who inspired that line did not attach a qualification about the vocabulary of the man carrying the cup.

And what is the milk? It is the first principles: that a person is born of God and not of himself, that nobody arranges their own birth, that this was done to you and it holds. Twenty six years of living off that is not nothing to hand over. It is the only thing that room needs.

You were given something that keeps, and you have been living off it long enough to know how it tastes. Scripture calls it the sincere milk of the word, and the same Spirit who fed a man on it for a quarter of a century is the one who moves it from one pair of hands to another.