Version Four on the Coast Road

She has been working on it since the second exit off the highway, which was two hours ago now, and she thinks she finally has it.

Version one was too long. It went back over everything, every year of it, and by the time she got to the end of it she had lost her own thread and the whole thing sounded like a person talking to fill a silence.

Version two blamed the circumstances. She heard herself doing it somewhere around the estuary bridge and she stopped mid sentence, because if she is going to say a thing to God she is not going to say that.

Version three she could not get through. She had to put the radio on.

Version four is the one. It is four sentences. It does not explain, it does not excuse, it does not go back over the ground, and it is true. She has said it eleven or twelve times now, out loud, in the car, with the coast on her right and the light going gold across the water and the road doing the long curves it does out here.

She pulls into the last overlook before the descent, where the gravel is and the two picnic tables nobody ever uses, because she wants to run it once more before she gets there. Engine off. The sea making its noise below.

She says the first three words of version four.

And then she cannot get to the fourth, because something has arrived in the car ahead of her that is warm and has nothing at all to do with what she was about to say, and she sits there with her hands still on the wheel and the whole speech sitting unused in her mouth.

You have your own version four. Maybe your own version nine. And you have been assuming that the door opens after you deliver it.

What the speech is really doing

Let me say something kind about the speech first, because it deserves it.

That speech is not laziness and it is not pride. It is the work of somebody who takes the thing seriously. You did not want to arrive casual. You wanted to come with something in your hands, something considered, something that showed you understood the weight of it, and there is a real dignity in that and I am not going to make fun of it.

But look at what the speech is quietly doing. It is setting a price. It is arranging matters so that when the welcome comes, it comes after something, and the something is yours, and then the welcome is legitimate and cannot be taken away by anyone including you. That is what all those drafts were for. Not for God. For the part of you that cannot receive a thing it did not pay for.

You are already carrying a welcome that was never priced, and no draft you write can make it more yours than it is. That is not sentiment, it is the plain sense of what is written in Luke 15, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been sitting in the passenger seat through all four versions without needing any of them.

The father does not let him finish

The son in that story is a rehearser. It is right there in the text, before he ever gets up off the ground.

He works out what he is going to say, and it is good. It is honest, it is short, it does not blame anybody, and it ends with the thing he thinks is realistic: make me as one of your hired servants. Put me on the staff. Let me earn my way back into the yard. It is version four. He has it word for word.

And then this happens.

But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.Luke 15:20

A great way off. Before the speech. Before the driveway, before the gate, before a single syllable of the prepared thing has been delivered. The father is already running, and running is not a dignified thing for a man of that age and that standing to do, and he does it anyway, in front of everyone, down the road.

The son does start his speech. He gets the first part out. And the father talks straight across him to the servants about a robe and a ring and shoes, and the line about the hired servants never gets said, because there is no place left in the conversation for it. The welcome did not wait for the explanation. It arrived first and it made the explanation unnecessary.

You were run toward while you were still a great way off, and the running started before your first draft did. Luke 15:20 is the ground under that, not my optimism, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put the warmth in the car before you reached the fourth sentence.

Nothing you say is being graded

Here is the part that catches people on the way in.

Once the speech comes off the table, the next question arrives immediately: then what do I say. And underneath that question is the same machinery running again, looking for the right words, the ones that will do the job properly this time.

There is no right wording. Scripture never once shows a person being assessed on how well they put it. The tax collector at the back of the temple manages one line and goes home justified. The thief on the cross gets out a single sentence with no theology in it and is told he will be in paradise that day. The father in Luke 15 interrupts a carefully prepared speech to call for a robe, which tells you exactly how much weight the wording was carrying.

You have permission to say something clumsy to God tonight and be fully received while saying it, because the receiving is Christ's work and not your composition. It is written all through the gospels and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a sentence from a person who has stopped trying to get it right.

So the pressure comes off both ends. You do not have to deliver the speech, and you do not have to replace it with a better one.