The One Tenth I Cannot Say

You say the whole thing on a Sunday and there is one line where your mouth keeps going and you are not in it.

Nobody has ever noticed. There is no pause. Your voice does not change. You are word perfect and have been since you were a boy and your grandmother taught it to you in her kitchen with the radio on.

It is one clause. Nine words, roughly, depending which version is being said.

And you have not been able to mean it since a particular February.

You believe the rest. That is the part that has made this so difficult to describe to anybody, including yourself. If somebody asked you to lay out what you hold, you would lay out nine tenths of it without a wobble and mean every word.

The tenth sits there like a stone in a shoe.

And what has grown up around it, over three or four years, is a conviction that a man who cannot say the whole thing has no business at the front of anything, and probably no business at the table either, and so you stand at the back now and you leave slightly early.

Before we go any further, hear me.

I am not correcting you.

There is nothing dishonest in you. A man who will not say a line he cannot mean is not a man with a faith problem, he is a man with an unusually high regard for what words are for.

I am saying I know which clause it is. That is all.

On some have compassion

Here is a very short verse in a very short letter, and it is one of the few places where Scripture tells you how to treat a person in your exact position.

And of some have compassion, making a difference.Jude 1:22

Making a difference means distinguishing. Telling apart. Jude is instructing the church not to treat everybody's difficulty as the same thing.

And the specific group he names first, before any other category in that passage, is the ones who are wavering. Not the ones who have walked away. The ones still standing there with a difficulty.

And the instruction about them is compassion.

That is what the Bible tells other people to do with you. It is worth knowing what the instruction was, because a completely different one has been applied here for four years.

So here it is, said directly to you, on that step in the sun.

You are the one that verse tells the church to have compassion on. Not one day, not once the clause comes right, not when you can say the whole of it. Right now, standing at the back with your coat over your arm, you are the person Jude names first, and he names them without a word of exclusion attached. That is not my comfort. That is what is written, and it is His Spirit who takes a written line and lands it on a real man on a real Sunday morning.

Now the plain thing, and there will be no clause on the end of it.

The tenth is not why.

Not why you feel outside. Not why the thing carried since that February has gone the way it has gone. I am not going to add a careful sentence about the importance of full assent, because a careful sentence there is exactly how a man ends up at the back of a building for four years.

Nine tenths held with your whole weight is not nine tenths of a man. Your grandmother did not teach you a scoring system in that kitchen. She taught you words to stand on, and you have been standing on them, in public, every week, including the weeks when one clause went past you.

And hear this, because it is settled rather than pending. You have a place at that table that no clause holds the deed to. The word says of some have compassion, and the some in that sentence are the wavering ones, and it is His Spirit who carries a written line into a real churchyard on a real bright morning.

The line will do what it does. It may come right and it may not. Neither outcome decides where you stand.