I Give the Same Answer Forty Times

He counted this year, which he had never done before, and the number was forty.

Forty separate people, in forty separate conversations, asking a version of the same hard question. He has an answer. It is a good answer, worked out over about fifteen years, tested against the text and against real lives, and it is true.

He gives it carefully every time. He does not give a compressed version to the fortieth person. He has a rule about that and he keeps it.

He is fifty five.

Here is what happened in October that he has told nobody.

A woman was sitting across a table from him and she asked the question, and he opened his mouth to answer it, and for about two seconds he could not remember why it was true. Not the words. He had the words. He has always got the words. What he did not have, for two seconds, was the thing underneath the words that makes them worth saying.

He gave the answer anyway. It landed. She was helped, genuinely, and thanked him, and he went home and sat in the car in his own driveway.

He has thought about those two seconds every week since.

And underneath it there is a question he has been circling and would prefer not to reach, which is when the last time was that anybody said this to him. Not asked him. Said it to him. He has been trying to remember and he cannot, and the trying has begun to feel like looking for something in a room where it plainly is not.

The sentence, unsaid: I have been talking for fifteen years and I cannot remember being spoken to.

You may know those two seconds. The true thing, still true, and something underneath it gone quiet.

The ear comes before the tongue

There is a passage in Isaiah about a servant whose job is to speak, and the order of the two organs in it is the whole point.

The Lord God hath given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary: he wakeneth morning by morning, he wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learned.Isaiah 50:4

Read the sequence. The tongue is mentioned first because the tongue is the job. Then the sentence turns, and what actually gets attended to every morning is not the tongue at all. It is the ear.

The servant in that passage does not maintain his speaking. He is given something to hear, daily, and the speaking comes out of the hearing.

You have been maintaining the wrong organ for fifteen years, and Isaiah 50:4 has God waken the ear morning by morning while the tongue is simply the output, and it is His Spirit who takes a line about a servant and lands it on a man sitting in his own driveway in October.

A word in season for the weary

Consider who the speaking is for, because the description fits somebody in that room and it is not only the woman across the table.

A word in season to him that is weary. That is the stated purpose of the tongue in that verse. And the man giving the answer for the fortieth time is, by any honest measure, weary, and there is no clause anywhere in the passage that excludes the speaker from being the one who needs the word.

He has been the delivery mechanism for a word aimed at the weary while quietly becoming the weary, which is not irony. It is just what happens over fifteen years if nobody is doing anything about the ear.

You are also the one that word is for, because the written word names the weary as the recipient and never exempts the servant who carries it, and His Spirit is what turns that from a neat observation into something a man can receive at a table.

And notice the frequency. Morning by morning. Not once at the start of a ministry. Not when the answer starts to go thin. Daily, as a maintenance schedule set by God rather than by the man, and it is the ear that gets attended to and not the material.

You are on a daily schedule that somebody else keeps, and Isaiah 50 puts the wakening in God's hands and repeats the phrase morning by morning so that nobody misses the rate, and the same Spirit who wakens is the one who fills.

Where the load is bigger than one man

I want to stop and say something plainly, because this site will not praise anybody for absorbing what one person cannot absorb.

Forty hard conversations in a year, every one of them given the full version, with nothing coming back the other way in fifteen years, is more than one man should be running on, and saying so is not a criticism of how he has run it. Tell a doctor plainly about the two seconds in October, because a momentary loss of the thing under the words is worth a real conversation and not a private worry. Ask about a counselor or a spiritual director, which is precisely the arrangement in which a man who is always the answerer gets to be the one who talks. And ask one person he respects, directly, to say the thing to him rather than waiting to be asked, because nobody offers this to a man who obviously knows it already.

And if the flatness has begun going somewhere heavier than tiredness, or the thought of not being here has started to feel restful rather than frightening, dial or text 988 in the United States, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and talk to a person tonight.

Asking to be taught something he already knows is not a loss of standing. You are held exactly as much on the day you sit and listen as on the forty days you answered, because Isaiah 50:4 has the servant's ear wakened before his tongue is used, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that true in the body rather than only in the sequence of a sentence.