Everything She Reads Is For Somebody Else

She noticed it on holiday, which is where things like this surface.

She had taken her Bible and a coffee out onto a balcony on the second morning, with nothing on, nowhere to be, and about ninety minutes in front of her.

And she opened it and got about four verses in and found she was underlining.

Not for herself. She was underlining the way she underlines, which is with a particular room in mind, and she caught herself doing it and stopped and looked at the page and thought: who am I reading this for.

And then she tried to remember the last time she had read anything without a room in her head.

She could not.

Three years, roughly. Possibly more. Every chapter, every commentary, every early morning: all of it excellent, all of it prepared, and all of it for somebody.

She is not resentful about it. This is work she chose and loves, and she is good at it, and there are people who have been genuinely changed by what she prepares.

But on that balcony, with ninety minutes and nobody to prepare for, she found she did not know how to read.

She sat there for a bit and then she went and did something else. And she has thought about that morning most weeks since.

Because a woman who cannot read for herself has a problem that will not show up anywhere. Nothing will fail. The teaching will stay good. Nobody will notice for another ten years, including her, and the only evidence will be a balcony every summer and the same small unpleasant discovery.

And you have a version of this. Something you do for God that has quietly eaten the thing you used to do with Him, and nothing has broken and nobody has noticed and you found it out somewhere unexpected.

That I may know Him

There is a passage in Philippians where a man who had every religious qualification available lists them and then does something startling with the list.

He is not modest about it. He gives the whole résumé, and it is genuinely impressive by the standards of his world, and then he says this.

Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.Philippians 3:8

Knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

Not knowing about. Not being able to teach on, which he could do better than almost anybody alive. Knowing, which is a word about acquaintance with a person, and my Lord, which is possessive and personal and has nothing institutional in it.

And he sets everything else beside that and finds it light.

You are made for an acquaintance rather than a competence, and the man with the best qualifications in the room said so first. It is written that I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord (Philippians 3:8), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes knowing into something that happens rather than something a person understands.

Now the underlining, because it is worth being precise about what it revealed.

You were four verses in and you were already marking for a room. That is not a character flaw and it is not hypocrisy. It is a trained reflex, built by three years of doing something valuable, and reflexes are what training produces.

The problem is not that you have it. The problem is that you have only got it.

You have acquired one excellent way of reading and you have lost the other one, and getting it back is not a matter of repentance. Scripture says taste and see that the Lord is good (Psalm 34:8), and tasting is a first person activity that cannot be done on anybody's behalf, and it is the Holy Spirit who gives that tasting, which He gives to a reader rather than to a preparer.

And the fact that nothing will fail.

This is the part that has kept you thinking about that balcony for months, and you are right to take it seriously.

Nothing will break. The teaching will hold up for years on skill and accumulated understanding, and the room will keep being fed, and there is no gate anywhere in your life that would catch this.

The only alarm is a woman on a balcony in the summer noticing that she cannot read a page for herself.

You were given the alarm and it did not come from your own vigilance. It is written that the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two edged sword, discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart (Hebrews 4:12), and it is the Holy Spirit who does that discerning, which is what happened to you at four verses in on a second morning.

And what to do about it, which is smaller than you think.

You do not need to stop preparing. Nobody is served by a teacher who has stopped studying and there is nothing wrong with an underlined page.

What is missing is a chapter with nobody in it. One that will never be used, that nobody will ever hear about, that produces nothing at all.

You are allowed to read something that will never be used, and that is not a waste of a morning. Scripture says that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection (Philippians 3:10), and it is His Spirit who makes reading into knowing, which is not an outcome that can be delivered to a room.