What Is Left Of What You Could Teach

August, and the heat has finally come off the driveway. The hose is coiled by the spigot where it always is, half of it in the grass. The cicadas are doing that thing where they all stop at once and then start again.

The neighbor kid is shooting at the hoop over your garage. The rim has been slightly bent since a storm two winters ago, so everything that goes in comes out at an angle, and he has learned to play the angle, which is the sort of thing sixteen year olds do without noticing they have done it.

You are in the folding chair with a glass of water you have not touched.

He shoots. Chases the ball down the slope. Comes back.

Then he says, holding the ball on his hip: "Hey. Can I ask you a religion thing?"

Once, this was your favorite sentence in the English language. Once, people came up the driveway on purpose. You could hold a room for forty minutes without a page in front of you. You were the person somebody's cousin got sent to.

Now your stomach does something.

He asks his question. It is a fair question, an honest one, the kind a sixteen year old asks when he has been turning something over on his own for a while.

And you answer it. Three sentences. That is what comes out, and you hear them leave your mouth, and they are true, and they are all you have.

They are the three that are left.

Everything else went. Not in one night. Over years, quietly, the way a house settles. The long answers stopped being available, then the medium ones, and some of what you used to say with total confidence you now cannot say at all, and you did not decide any of that. It happened.

He bounces the ball twice. The garage motion light clicks on because of the movement, which happens every night around this time and still makes you look up.

And here it comes. The fourth question.

That is the thing you live with now, right there. Not the three sentences. The fourth question. The dread of the follow up, the one that goes one inch past the edge of what you have, and you are already bracing before he opens his mouth, the way you brace for a step in the dark that might not be there.

He asks it.

And you say, "I do not know. I used to think I did."

He says, "Huh." Then he shoots.

Ball off the bent rim, out at its angle, down the slope again. The cicadas stop and start. And you sit in the folding chair with a glass of water going warm in your hand, and the dread does not lift just because a sixteen year old did not care.

Standing on what did not go

Start with an honest inventory, because you have been running a dishonest one for a while.

Two different things left that driveway over the years, and you have been grieving them as one. The first is capacity: the forty minutes without a page, the long answers, the whole shelf. The second is Christ. Only one of those actually went, and it was not the second one. You have been mourning as though the shelf and the Lord left together, and Scripture is what separates them, not me, and His Spirit has kept the second one under you the entire time the first was going.

Paul says something to Timothy that reads as though it were written for a man in a folding chair. It is in 2 Timothy 2:13: if we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself. Sit inside that for a second. His faithfulness is not sized to match yours. It does not thin out when yours thins out, because it is not a response to yours at all. It rests on His own nature, and He cannot deny Himself. You are standing on something that is not measured against your current capacity, and the written word says so, and what turns that from a slogan into a floor is His Spirit.

Which means the three sentences are not the last of your supply. They are what you can still say. Those are different facts about different things. The supply was never yours, and what you can still say was never the load bearing structure.

Now, the fourth question, because that is the thing actually running your evenings.

Notice what the dread assumes. It assumes that the edge of what you can teach is the edge of what is holding you. That if he pushes one more inch and finds nothing there, then there was nothing there. But you already know that is not how it works, because the three sentences you gave that boy did not become false at the moment you ran out. They are still true right where they sit, and the ground under them did not stop at the third one.

"I do not know" cost you nothing tonight. It felt like it cost you everything, and it cost you nothing, and the reason it felt expensive is that it used to be the one sentence you never had to use.

That is the harder loss, and it should be said out loud rather than stepped around: you used to be the person people asked. Being asked was part of who you were in that neighborhood, and it went, and no one held a service for it. That is a real loss and it deserves to be called one. What it is not is a verdict on you. You have your standing on the ground of His faithfulness, not on the ground of your usefulness to somebody's cousin, and that is exactly what is written in that verse, carried to you by the same Spirit who put it in Paul's hand.

Now, the promise nobody is going to make to you here.

Nothing in this says the shelf refills. Nothing here tells you that three is a stage on the way back to forty, that this is a season, that it is coming back if you hold on. That would be a comfortable thing to say and it would be a lie dressed in kindness, and enough of those have already been handed to you across enough kitchen tables. Whether anything ever returns is His to decide, and He answers as He chooses.

What is being said is much smaller and much more useful. Three is a floor. A floor is not a partial ceiling. It is the thing you stand on, and you are standing on it right now, and it has been holding your weight through every evening you spent bracing in that chair. His faithfulness underneath it is what makes it hold, and His Spirit walked you onto it, and He is not going to deny Himself in order to drop you.

If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself.2 Timothy 2:13, KJV

So the three are not a remnant to apologize for. They are what you handed a sixteen year old in a driveway on an August evening, and they were true when they left your mouth, and they were enough for the question he actually asked.