One Thing, Done

Ade has forty one talks saved on his phone.

He knows the number because he counted them one night, and then felt strange about having counted them, and then saved another one. Ninety six episodes in the queue. Three books on the go, all of them stopped somewhere between page thirty eight and page forty two, which he assumes says something about him although he has not looked into it.

He is not a fraud. This is the thing to understand about Ade before you judge him, and you will not, because you are him.

He genuinely loves it. The good ones still get him. He can tell you what four different people think about the same eight verses. He listens on the school run, on the treadmill, doing the washing up, at one and a half times speed because there is so much of it and life is short.

And he cannot remember the last time any of it changed a single thing he actually did.

There is a phone call he has not made.

Two years, near enough. His brother. It is not even a big thing, which is the humiliating part. There was a comment at a family thing about their mother's house, and a silence, and then a second silence that hardened, and now there is a two year silence that neither of them can remember the terms of, and both of them are waiting for the other one, and their mother has stopped asking.

He knows what to do. He does not need one more talk on forgiveness. He has, at a rough count, eleven of them on that phone.

And here is the moment, and it happened on a Tuesday in traffic.

He is driving. He is listening to a good man saying a true thing about reconciliation at one and a half times speed. And he comes to the roundabout where the third exit goes down to his brother's road, six minutes away, and he takes the second exit, the way he always does, without one flicker of hesitation.

Half a mile later he heard the talk say something about the cost of waiting for the other person to move first.

And Ade reached out and turned it off. In the middle of a sentence. And drove the rest of the way home in complete silence with his ears ringing.

They kept their answers short on purpose

There is an old and lovely habit, from people who went out to live in the desert a very long time ago, and it went like this.

You traveled a long way to find one of them. Days. And when you finally sat down in front of an old man or an old woman with a face like a walnut, you did not ask a question. You said: give me a word.

And what came back was one line. Sometimes eight words. Sometimes fewer.

You then walked all the way home carrying it.

Now, they were not against learning, and neither am I, and this is where I want to be careful with you because it would be easy to hear this as an attack on the very thing that has fed you. It is not. Study is good. Teachers are a gift. The forty one talks on Ade's phone were made by people who love God and worked hard, and half of them are excellent, and I am not telling you to delete anything.

The elders answered short for a much kinder reason.

They knew a person can only carry one thing out of a door. Hand somebody a paragraph and they take a feeling home. Hand them a line and they take the line home, and they still have it a fortnight later, and a fortnight later it has cost them something, which is the only way anybody ever changes.

Which is what James is getting at, in a sentence so plain it is almost rude.

But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.James 1:22

Deceiving yourselves. That is a strong phrase and it is worth sitting with, because of what it says the deception actually is.

The lie is not that Ade knows nothing. He knows a great deal. The lie is the feeling of movement. Listening to a true thing lights up the same part of a person as doing it. It feels like progress. It has all the sensations of a life going somewhere, and you can run on it for years, and the whole time the third exit at the roundabout goes untaken.

I am not going to tell you to go and live in a desert either, in case that is where this looked like it was heading. Nobody is asking you to leave your job, your family, your church or your responsibilities. The elders went out to a place with nothing in it so that there would be only one thing in front of them at a time. You do not need the sand. You need the same simplification, for about twenty minutes, tonight, in a kitchen.

And here is the freeing part, and it is genuinely freeing, so let it in.

You are not waiting on more information. You already know the thing. You have known it for two years. It is the call, or the apology, or the thing you said you would take round and never took round, or sitting with the person nobody sits with, or telling the truth to one person who deserves it. You could name it in three seconds if I stopped talking.

You have enough to be going on with. That is not a rebuke. That is a release, and it is the whole message. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is not withholding a further instruction you need before you can move.