Eight Sentences and None of Them Fit

He had eight sentences and he had written them at the kitchen table at half past five that morning.

They were good sentences. He is not a bad speaker and he has done a lot of these, and everything on that piece of paper was true.

Then he stood up.

The mother was in the second row. Twenty-six years old, and the mother was in the second row, and there was a woman on either side of her holding an arm each, and the middle of that row was where his eyes went before he could stop them.

And every one of the eight sentences went out of him at once.

Not nerves. He knew exactly where the paper was and he could have read it. What happened is that he looked at that row and understood, in about a second and a half, that not one of the eight was the size of what was in front of him. All true. All of them the sort of thing you can say at the front of a room. None of them able to go anywhere near that woman.

He stood there for what he was later told was about four seconds and felt like a great deal more.

And what he said in the end was: I do not have anything big enough for this. And then he said the shortest of the eight, which was that God is near to the brokenhearted, and then he said it again, and then he sat down.

Afterwards, in the vestry, with his coat on and everybody gone, he put his head in his hands.

Twenty-two years of this and he had stood up at the funeral of a twenty-six year old and produced nine words and a repetition.

The Spirit takes over exactly where the words stop

Let me say the true thing about that room before anything else, and it is not the encouraging thing yet.

Nothing you could have said would have been the size of that second row. Not the eight. Not eighty. There was no version of that morning where a man with a piece of paper covered what was happening to that woman, and the four seconds you spent standing there were you finding that out in public.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as consolation: you were not empty up there. Running out of what fits is not the same as having nothing. That is not my generous reading of a bad morning, it is what stands written in Romans, where the Spirit is described as taking over at exactly the point where a person's words give out, and the same Holy Spirit was in that building on Thursday.

Read what Paul says happens in the gap, because it is one of the most practical verses in the letter.

In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.Romans 8:26

We do not know what we ought to pray for. Not sometimes. Stated as the ordinary human condition.

And the answer is not better preparation. The answer is that Someone else is doing the carrying in a mode that does not use language at all.

So this is yours right now rather than pending some future occasion where you find the right words: what left that pulpit and reached the second row was not carried by your eight sentences, because the written word says the Spirit Himself intercedes where the words run out, and He is not restricted to what a man managed to say out loud.

Now let me tell you what actually happened in that room, because you have been reading it wrong since Thursday.

You said: I do not have anything big enough for this.

Every single person in that building had been thinking exactly that since the phone call. And a man stood up at the front, in a collar or a good coat, and said it out loud, and by saying it he told four hundred people that their speechlessness was not a failure of faith.

Then you said God is near to the brokenhearted, twice, and you sat down.

That is not nine words and a repetition. That is a man refusing to paper over the size of a grief and then putting one true thing into the room and letting it stand there without decoration. What is written is that the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit, and the Holy Spirit does not need a man to elaborate on a sentence like that in order to drive it home.

And the guard on this, because it matters: none of it means preparation is a waste or that a room is best served by whatever comes into your head. You got up at half past five and wrote eight true things, and that was faithfulness, and you would do it again. The paper was not the failure. The paper simply was not the whole supply, and you found that out in front of everybody.