The Roof I Promised in April

He said it in April, in her kitchen, holding a mug he did not want.

Her husband had been gone about a year by then and she had said something about the shed leaking onto the seed trays, not complaining, the way people mention a thing they have decided to live with.

And he said: I will come and do that for you. Give me a couple of Saturdays.

He meant it entirely. There was nothing polite about it. He had already worked out in his head what it would take and roughly what the sheeting would cost.

That was April.

Since April he has been to a men's weekend in the spring and a three-day thing in July that was genuinely excellent and that he has talked about more than once. He has got through four books. He has listened to something most mornings in the truck, and there is a series on the minor prophets he is halfway into that is the best thing he has heard in years.

And on Sunday she asked after his knee, which he had mentioned once, and said she hoped it was easier.

He got to the truck before it hit him properly.

Four months. Two conferences. Four books. Half a series on the minor prophets. And a woman on her own with a shed roof letting water onto her seed trays, who has not mentioned it once since April and is not going to.

The man on the rock is the one who hears and does

Let me put something down before the rest of it, because this article is not here to take the summer off you.

The July thing was excellent and you were right to go. The minor prophets series is doing you good and you should finish it. Nobody here is going to tell you that a man should stop learning until his list is clear, because that is not how a life works and it is not how the Lord treats anybody.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as a scolding: you already have everything required for that roof, and you have had since April. That is not my brisk reading of a busy summer, it is what stands written at the end of the sermon on the mount, where the difference between the two builders is not knowledge, and the same Holy Spirit who carried that ending got you as far as the truck on Sunday before it landed.

Read the line, and notice how narrow the gap between the two men is.

Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.Matthew 7:24

Both men in that passage hear. That is the part people skip. The foolish one is not ignorant and did not miss the sermon; he heard the same words, and the difference between a house that stands and one that comes down is one verb.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a clearer month: the doing is not a separate stage you have to work up to, because the written word puts hearing and doing in the same sentence as one movement, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been holding a shed roof in front of you all summer.

Now let me name the mechanism honestly, because you are not a lazy man and it would be false to write as though you were.

A conference has a date on it. It is in the calendar, other people are going, and if you do not turn up somebody notices. A roof has no date on it. Nobody is expecting you on any particular Saturday, and the woman is never going to ring, and every single week that passes makes it slightly more awkward to turn up, which makes the next week more likely to pass as well.

That is not sloth. That is a promise with no deadline attached decaying the way promises with no deadlines do.

And the cost is not the roof. The cost is that she has stopped expecting it, and a woman on her own who has stopped expecting things is losing something more important than seed trays. What is written says let your yes be yes, and the Holy Spirit has been reminding a man about April on Sundays because that is how He works on somebody who genuinely means well.