Round Four

Round four is always the one nobody wants, because round four at the Fox is General Knowledge, and General Knowledge at the Fox means whatever the quizmaster has been reading.

Tonight it is Scripture. There is a groan around the back room and somebody at the next table says out loud that they are finished, and her team turns to her the way a team turns when it remembers something.

She does not even slow down.

Who did Jacob work seven years for, and then another seven. What is the shortest verse in the Bible. How many books are in the New Testament, and name the four that come first, in order. Which prophet went up in a whirlwind. Who was the tax collector who climbed a tree, and what was the name of the town.

She writes them all in block capitals while the others are still saying wait, wait, hang on. Her handwriting does not hesitate once. When the answers are read out the table makes a noise like a small crowd and somebody thumps her on the shoulder, and the lad opposite, who is twenty-three and delighted, says how do you even know all that.

She laughs and says she grew up in it.

And she means it kindly and it is true and everyone moves on to round five, and she sits there in the warm noise of the back room with a pen in her hand and a thought that has arrived from nowhere and will not go: every single one of those answers is true. Not true like a fact about a river. True like a thing she would stake her life on, and would have at any point in the last twenty years, and none of it, not one line, has been anywhere near the place where she actually lives.

You have won that round. Maybe not in a back room. But you know it, you have always known it, you would defend it if somebody went after it in front of you, and you have quietly begun to suspect that knowing it that well while living this far off is the most damning thing about you.

Your hands still know the piece

I have watched people sit down at a piano they have not touched in fifteen years, put their hands on the keys apologizing the whole time, and then play a whole piece through without a single wrong note.

They are always astonished. And they always say the same thing afterward, which is some version of I do not know where that came from. But it did not come from anywhere. It never left. It was in the hands the entire time, underneath the years, waiting for somebody to put them down on the keys.

That is what happened to you in round four, and I want to say the plainest possible thing about it before anything else: you were not faking, you are not a fraud, and what you knew on Thursday night is knowledge that is really in you. I am not being nice to you. The word for it is in Scripture, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my flattery who has kept it alive in a person who was not using it:

But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.Deuteronomy 30:14

In thy mouth. In thy heart. That is a description of a person who can produce the whole thing on demand and has not been living in it, and it is not written as an accusation. It is written as good news, and Moses says it to a crowd standing at the edge of a country they have not entered yet.

Nigh is a measurement

Look at what the verse is actually doing, because the context is the whole thing.

Moses has just said what the word is not. It is not up in heaven, so that somebody has to go up and fetch it down for you. It is not beyond the sea, so that somebody has to cross over and bring it back. He takes away, one at a time, every version of the errand, and then he says: it is very nigh unto thee.

Nigh is not a compliment. It is a measurement. He is not telling those people they are doing well. He is telling them how far away the thing is, and the answer is: no distance at all, it is in your mouth already, and the expedition can be called off.

Now put that next to Thursday night. You have been reading your intact belief as the proof of how bad this is. Look how much I know and look how I live. And Scripture reads exactly the same fact in the opposite direction: the words being still in your mouth is not the charge sheet, it is the distance.

You have the whole of it in your mouth and in your heart right now, and that is not the evidence against you, that is how short the walk is. Deuteronomy 30 is where that is written and Paul repeats it word for word in Romans 10 without changing a syllable of it, and it is His Spirit who has kept it in a person who was not using it, which is not a thing a person does for themselves.

Two rooms in the same house

Let me be honest about the other half, because I am not going to pretend the distance is not real.

It is real. You know it and I am not going to argue you out of something you can see. There is a room in the house where everything you believe is kept, complete and in order and correct, and there is another room where your Tuesdays happen, and for a long time now the door between them has not been opened much. Both rooms are real. That is the whole of your situation and it is not more complicated than that.

Here is what I will not do with it. I will not tell you that the first room is a fake because the second room does not match it, because that is not true and Scripture never says it. And I will not tell you why the door stopped being used, because I do not know, and neither does anyone else who offers you a reason.

What I will tell you is this. You are not two people, you are one person with the word already in you, and the Spirit who put it there did not stop being in the house when the door stopped being used. That is Deuteronomy 30:14 as it stands, and the same Spirit who kept the answers in your mouth for twenty years of not needing them is the one carrying this line into the room you actually live in.

The door is not locked. It never was. It is a door that has not been used, which is a completely different thing, and the difference is the size of your whole situation.