Eleven Takes

The shopping is in the boot and the trolley has gone back and she is sitting in the driver's seat with the key not turned yet, because there is a thing she has been meaning to do for a while and this is the first place all week that is quiet.

She uses voice notes for work. It is an ordinary thing in her hand. So she opens the app and she thinks, right, and she presses the red circle.

God, I. Stop. Delete.

She tries again. This one starts better. It gets as far as saying that she is sorry it has been so long, and then it gets into why it has been so long, and the why goes wrong immediately because there is more than one why and none of them is the real one. Eleven seconds. Delete.

The third one she does with her eyes shut. The fourth one she does in a different voice, lower, the way you talk when you are being serious, and hears herself doing it, and stops, embarrassed in an empty car.

Somewhere around the seventh the rain starts, quite hard, all at once on the roof, and a man goes past pushing a trolley with a toddler in it who has both arms up like a champion.

Take eleven is not better than take one. She looks at the screen where nothing has been saved. She puts the phone face down in the cup holder, and she says, out loud, to the windscreen: I do not know how to say it.

You have that speech. Maybe not in a car park with a red circle on a screen, but you have it worked out, and you have had it worked out for a long time, and you have not said one line of it. And somewhere in there the speech stopped being the way in and quietly became the reason you are still outside.

The speech is a toll booth you built

I want to start with something a little unkind to the speech itself, and nothing at all unkind to you.

Notice what every take begins with. Not hello. Not I miss You. It begins with the apology, and then it goes to the explanation, and the explanation is where every take falls over. That order is not random. It is the order you would use with somebody you owed money to.

That is what has quietly happened. Somewhere the way back turned into a transaction and the speech became the payment, and now the speech has to be right, because a payment that is short is worse than no payment at all. So take eleven gets deleted for the same reason take one did: it is not enough yet.

Nobody put that toll booth on the road. You did, and I say that with enormous sympathy, because everybody does it and it is the most reasonable thing in the world.

So here is the first thing to have, and it is a finished thing and not a target: you are not standing in front of a gate that opens when the wording gets good enough, and there is no toll on this road at all. That is not me being generous with something that is not mine. Scripture is where it is written, and it is the Holy Spirit and not the quality of a sentence who carries a person the last few feet.

What was actually happening in those eleven takes

Now the part that I think will genuinely surprise you, because it surprised me the first time I read it properly.

Paul is writing about prayer, and he does not describe someone eloquent. He describes someone who cannot manage it:

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.Romans 8:26

We know not what we should pray for as we ought. That is take four in a lower voice with your eyes shut. And groanings which cannot be uttered is not a mystical noise. Uttered means got out. It is the thing that is real and true and will not come out of a mouth, and the verse says the Spirit Himself is the one carrying it.

Which means the eleven takes were never silence. Something was going on in that car and it was not nothing, and it was not you failing to produce a sentence. It was the Spirit interceding underneath a woman who could not find the words, which is precisely the condition the verse was written for.

You have had the Spirit Himself putting your case while you deleted take after take, and that has already been happening rather than waiting on you to get it right. Romans 8 is written and it does not have a competence clause in it anywhere, and He is the same Spirit who has kept you trying eleven times when it would have been easier to start the car.

The father does not let him finish

And now the other half, which is the half this whole site stands on.

The son in Luke 15 wrote a speech. We know he wrote it because we get to hear him rehearse it in the far country, and there are three parts: I have sinned against heaven and before thee, I am no more worthy to be called thy son, make me as one of thy hired servants. He carries that speech the entire way home. It is what he is holding when the house comes into view.

Then the father sees him a long way off and runs. And the son starts. He gets the first part out and the second part out. And the third part, the one about being staff instead of family, the one he had almost certainly practiced the most, never gets said, because the father is already talking over the top of him to the servants about a robe and a ring and shoes for his feet (Luke 15:21-22).

He was interrupted. That is the shape of the welcome in this story: it arrives before the explanation is delivered, and it cuts off the worst line of the speech before it can be spoken into the air.

You are welcomed before the explanation and not after it, and the last third of your speech is not required from you today. That is Luke 15 as it is written, and it is His Spirit who takes a story two thousand years old and makes it a father running toward a person in a wet car park.

Notice too what the father never does. He never corrects the wording. He never says try that again. There is no grading in the story anywhere, and there is none here.