Too Little To Hand A Person

There are eight mailboxes on one leaning post at the end of the lane, and hers is the third from the left, and the little door has never shut properly since the winter the post moved.

It was twenty to five on a Thursday. Ruth had come down for the mail in her gardening shoes, which she was aware of, because the man from the gray house was already there with his engine still running and his grandson in the back seat kicking the passenger seat in a slow rhythm.

They had lived on the same lane for nine years. They had talked about the water pressure, the council, the ash tree, the ice on the bend in February. Somebody's dog. Somebody's roof.

He shut his own mailbox door and did not walk away. He stood there with a bag of softener salt against his hip and he said, and she could hear him deciding to say it, that his grandson had asked him something on Sunday and he had not been able to answer it. He said the boy had asked whether anybody is actually there. Then he said, and this is the part Ruth kept afterward, that he had thought of her.

He asked her, straight out, in the flat voice of a man who has rehearsed a sentence in a car, what it was she believed. Not what she was. What she believed.

And she heard herself answer, quite simply, before she had time to arrange anything: I believe Him.

Three words. They went out into the lane and stood there.

And then the silence lasted about a second and a half, and she could not bear it, and she began to talk.

She said it was complicated. She said she did not really go anywhere anymore, not since, well. She said she would not want to speak for anyone. She said there was a lot she used to be sure about that she was not sure about now, and that he should probably ask somebody who still had it all together, and did he know the family in the end house, because they were lovely people and they went somewhere on Sundays.

It took maybe forty seconds. She watched his face while she did it. His face had been open when she said the three words. It was not open by the end. He nodded, twice, in the way people nod when they are letting you off. He said thanks anyway, and he got in, and the boy waved at her through the glass because the boy did not know anything had happened.

She walked back up the lane with a seed catalog and two envelopes and she was still saying it to herself at the sink two hours later.

She had not lied to him. Every one of those forty seconds was true.

But she had handed a man three words that were solid gold, and then, because they looked so small lying there in his hand, she had piled forty seconds of packing material on top of them until he could not see them anymore.

Six words, said in a doorway

The confession that carried a whole people out of Egypt and through every century since is six words long in the language it was given in. Not six sentences. Six words. You can say it while somebody is still finding their keys.

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD: And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.Deuteronomy 6:4, 5

Read the instructions that come right after it. It is to be talked about sitting in the house and walking by the road, at bedtime and at waking, written on the doorposts and on the gates. That is not the packaging of a document. That is a line built to be said at a threshold, in the four seconds a person has while their hand is on the latch.

It was designed small. Small was not what was left of it after something went wrong. Small was the point, because a thing that has to be portable has to be light, and a thing that has to reach a child has to be short.

So hear this where you are standing. You have not been left with scraps. What is in your mouth is the same order of thing that was written on the doorposts, and I am not the one saying so: Deuteronomy 6 puts the whole confession into six words on purpose, and what has kept that line alive in the mouths of ordinary people for three thousand years is His Spirit and not anybody's enthusiasm.

Now I want to be careful with you, because there is a lie that lives next door to this one and it wears the same coat. Nothing here says that doctrine is a waste of time or that study is vanity. The very next verses command teaching, and diligent teaching at that, all day and across generations. Your short answer is enough. It is not complete, and it was never meant to be complete, and the difference between those two words is the difference between a doorway and a house.

Enough means it will hold weight right now, in the lane, with the engine running. Complete means nothing is left to learn, and nobody who has ever loved God has claimed that for long. You are allowed to keep reading and keep asking, and Deuteronomy 6:7 commands exactly that, diligently and out loud and across a whole household. What you are not required to do is wait until you are complete before you are allowed to be honest, because the Holy Spirit teaches a person over a lifetime and does not hold their mouth shut until the lesson is finished.

Look again at what actually happened at those mailboxes. The answer was not too small. The answer was exactly the right size and it was not trusted. The forty seconds afterward were not more truth. They were armor, and they were aimed at protecting the person speaking, not at helping the man who asked.

You are trusted with it, right now, small as it looks in your hand. The word is nigh thee, says Romans 10:8, even in thy mouth, and that nearness is the Holy Spirit's doing and not a matter of how much you can currently defend.

There is a reason the additions feel responsible. They feel like humility. Adding the qualifier feels like honesty about your limits. But watch where the qualifier lands: it lands on the other person, who did not come to the mailbox with a question about your credentials. He came with a question about whether anybody is there.

And you were given the answer to that one. You were given it before you lost the vocabulary, and you still have it, and the reason you can still say it in a lane in your gardening shoes is that His word does not depend on your standing to remain true, and the landing of it inside the other person is His Spirit's work, which was never your job in the first place.