He Only Meets Him On The Way To Something

He counted it on a Tuesday, which is not a thing he recommends doing.

Four things. He is involved in four things, and two of them he started, and one of them would probably stop if he did, which is a sentence he has thought and has never said out loud to anybody.

He is not complaining. He wants that clear. He loves most of it and he is good at it and it is a genuinely good use of a life.

What he counted was something else.

He went back over the last two years, as best he could, and tried to identify a single conversation with God that had not taken place in a car on the way to do something for Him, or in a car afterward, or in about eleven minutes in a car park before going in.

He could find two. Both of them were in a hospital, both of them in the middle of somebody else's crisis, and both of them, he noticed, were also on the way to something.

So: two years, four things, and a relationship with God that lives entirely in transit.

He talks to Him constantly. That is the confusing part. There is barely an hour of his week where he is not saying something, and he means it, and it is not empty.

But every single one of those hours is a working conversation. It is about the thing coming up, or the person he is going to see, or the problem in one of the four.

He has not sat down with Him in two years. Not once, that he can find, and he is a man who keeps a good record of his own life.

And what got him, sitting there on the Tuesday with the list in front of him, is that he cannot picture what it would even look like.

And you know this. Everything you say to Him is about the next thing, and there is no version of your week where the two of you are simply in a room.

One thing is necessary, and He would not take it off her

There is a house in Luke ten with two sisters in it, and the passage gets used to beat serving people over the head, which is not what is happening in the text.

One of them is doing all the work. The other is sitting.

And the one doing the work asks Him to intervene, which is a completely reasonable request from somebody who is doing everything.

But the Lord answered her, "Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her."Luke 10:41-42

Read what He says to her first. He says her name twice, which in that idiom is affection rather than rebuke. And He identifies what is actually wrong, which is not the serving: it is that she is anxious and troubled about many things.

He does not tell her to stop cooking. Nobody in that account is told to stop. There is a meal happening and He is at it.

You are not being asked to put down one of the four things, and the account never asks anybody to stop serving. It is written, Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary (Luke 10:41-42), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that distinction land warmly on a man who serves in four capacities and has just counted two years.

Now the thing about transit, because it is worth being precise.

The conversations in the car are real. They are not lesser prayer and they are not a failure. Praying about the person you are going to see is a good use of eleven minutes and God is in that car, and two years of it is two years of genuine communication.

Nothing about that is being downgraded here.

What has happened is not that you have prayed badly. It is that there is a second thing, and it has been squeezed out, and you cannot picture it because you have not done it in a long time and nobody misses what they cannot picture.

You have had one real thing all along and there is a second one that has been missing. Scripture says one thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord (Psalm 27:4), and gazing is not a transit activity, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes it possible for a busy man to do a thing with no output.

And the sentence you have never said out loud.

One of them would probably stop if you did.

That is a heavy thing to carry and it is probably true, and this page is not going to tell you it is not. But notice what it does: it converts a load bearing man into a man who cannot sit down, and once that conversion happens the two minutes become impossible on principle rather than on time.

You are not the thing holding it up, and nothing is going to fall over in the two minutes you sit still. It is written that unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain (Psalm 127:1), and it is the Holy Spirit who is the actual load bearing member in every one of the four, which He has been the whole time you have been carrying them.

And what it would look like, since you cannot picture it.

It looks like nothing. That is the honest answer and it is why it is so hard for a man like you.

Two minutes, sitting, with nothing being produced and nothing being solved and no next thing being prepared for. It has no output, and a man who has organized his whole life around output will find those two minutes almost physically difficult, which is exactly how you know they are the missing piece.

You are able to be with Him without producing anything, and there is nothing in that which is wasted. Scripture says be still, and know that I am God (Psalm 46:10), and it is His Spirit who supplies the knowing in the stillness, which is not an achievement and cannot be added to any list.