There is a kind of confidence that comes from knowing what to say.
We enter a room, recognize the people, and settle into the familiar rhythm. We know which words will be understood. We know how to begin a prayer, how to describe an experience, and how to offer a thought that belongs comfortably among the thoughts already being spoken. There is affection in the room. There is history. Much of what happens there may have helped us through difficult years.
And yet, sometimes, we leave with a quiet hunger we cannot explain.
Nothing was particularly wrong. The words were true. The people were sincere. We may have contributed something ourselves. Still, somewhere beneath the satisfaction of having participated, there remains a small unanswered question: Why do I feel as though we have spoken around something we did not quite allow ourselves to receive?
I have learned to be careful with that question. It can become an accusation too quickly. I cannot see into another person’s communion with Christ. A familiar prayer may be full of love, and an awkward prayer may be full of self-consciousness. The sound does not settle the matter.
But I can notice what happens in me.
I can notice when my words arrive before my attention. I can notice when I am preparing a contribution while another person is still speaking. I can notice when I feel more secure because I know how an occasion works than because I am resting in the One who is our life.
These are small things. Perhaps that is why they deserve our attention. Much of what gradually distances us from the simplicity of Christ enters through things too familiar to alarm us.
When Help Becomes Habit
We do not ordinarily decide to replace living faith with habit. We learn something helpful. We repeat it. Someone else finds help through it. Eventually the way we received help becomes the way we expect help to come.
Then the expectation grows quiet enough to seem natural.
A certain manner of speaking begins to sound mature. A particular kind of activity begins to look faithful. Someone who participates readily seems open. Someone who hesitates seems to need encouragement. Our interpretations become quick, almost effortless, and we may stop noticing how much we have assumed.
The person who hesitates might be tired. She might be carrying a concern she has not found words for. She might need time to understand what everyone else appears to understand already. Or she might see something the rest of us have overlooked.
If we already know what her hesitation means, there is little room left to discover her.
I wonder how often our spiritual understanding becomes most unhelpful at precisely this point: when it allows us to stop listening.
A brother begins describing a painful experience, and an explanation rises in us. We know the verse. We know the principle. We recognize the lesson he might need to learn. Perhaps the explanation is sound. But he has scarcely finished speaking, and already we are bringing his experience into the shape of our understanding.
He may leave with good advice and the feeling that he was never quite heard.
Life asks something more patient of us. It asks us to remain present long enough for the other person to become more than an example of something we already know.
This is one reason I have become less impressed by the speed of an answer. Some answers arrive quickly because they are clear. Others arrive quickly because we have not yet allowed the question to reach us.
The Language We Inherit
The same thing can happen with the language we inherit.
Someone, years before us, knew something of Christ with great immediacy. He struggled to put it into words. Those words helped others. They were remembered, written down, explained, and passed along. Eventually they reached us, carrying the affection and authority of all those years.
We may receive something precious through them. We may also learn to repeat them before we know what they describe.
Then, because the words are familiar, the experience can begin to seem familiar too.
It takes a certain freedom to admit otherwise. It takes a safe friendship to say, “I have used that expression for a long time, but I am not sure I know what it means in my actual life.”
I think such a sentence deserves a welcome. It may contain more openness than a fluent explanation. At least the person has ceased pretending to himself.
Perhaps we need more places where we can speak that honestly. Places where uncertainty does not immediately lower our standing, and where a simple account of the day is received with as much attention as a carefully arranged spiritual thought.
A person might say that he was impatient with his wife, that he apologized, and that something in him became quiet afterward. There may be no unusual vocabulary in the account. Yet we recognize the humanity of it. We can receive it without asking him to turn it into a lesson.
Christ’s life does not require elaborate language in order to become actual among us.
The Life Already Given
By life, I mean something deeper than an elevated mood or a successful meeting. I mean the life given to us in Christ, the life the New Testament calls us to live from. He is not waiting at a distance for us to become sufficiently capable. He has made His home in us. Our learning serves that reality when it helps us rest in and respond to what is already given.
Sometimes, however, learning makes us feel permanently unprepared.
There is always another explanation to understand, another capacity to develop, another example of maturity beside which our own experience appears small. We begin to imagine that direct dependence upon Christ belongs somewhere beyond our present condition, after we have become more disciplined or more informed.
Meanwhile, the actual day is waiting to be lived.
There is someone to listen to. There is work to do. There is a hurt to acknowledge, a responsibility to keep, a little joy to receive. We are already within the circumstances where His life can find expression. We need not graduate from being ordinary before we can live by Him.
Room for Honest Questions
I find this especially important when I think about younger people.
We naturally want to give them what has helped us. We want to spare them confusion. We teach, encourage, arrange opportunities, and hope to see them become strong. Much of this comes from love.
Yet love must be willing to discover who the young person actually is.
She may ask questions we did not ask. He may need more time than we expected. Their gifts may develop in directions we had not imagined. If every good possibility in their lives must first become useful to our plans, our care has become narrower than we intended.
A child can learn very early which answers make adults smile. He may become remarkably good at giving them. We should enjoy his learning without assuming that his readiness to answer tells us everything about his inward life.
Does he know that he may say he does not understand? Does he know that discomfort can be spoken? Can he ask a question whose answer might require us to reconsider something?
The atmosphere surrounding those questions may teach him more about truth than the lesson itself.
If he discovers that honesty is safe, he has received something of lasting value. If he discovers that belonging depends upon the approved answer, he may become careful long before he becomes convinced.
Adults can learn the same caution.
We learn to recognize the response that keeps a conversation comfortable. We know when a question is welcome and when it will be interpreted as an attitude. No rule needs to be announced. A pause, a change of expression, or the withdrawal of warmth can teach us what is expected.
After a while, agreement may become difficult to distinguish from our wish to remain close to the people we love.
This does not mean that every shared conviction is false or that every influence is controlling. We need one another. We learn through trust. But trust grows healthier when it can bear an honest difference.
I would like to belong among people with whom I can say, “I do not see that yet,” and remain fully present in their affection. I would like to offer that same freedom to them.
Loved Beyond Our Usefulness
There is also something we need to understand about capable people.
They often take responsibility because they see what needs doing. They speak because others hesitate. They organize because an arrangement is needed. Their help may be considerable. Yet an entire gathering can gradually settle around their competence until the other members scarcely know how to participate without them.
The capable person may not notice. He may feel burdened rather than important. Others may praise his faithfulness while quietly surrendering their own responsibility.
Love might require him to leave something unfinished long enough for another person to take part. It might require receiving a contribution less polished than the one he could have supplied. It might require discovering that a gathering can be alive without bearing the mark of his ability.
And love might require the rest of us to stop asking him to carry everything.
No one should have to remain indispensable in order to remain loved.
That sentence reaches far beyond public leadership. It reaches the person who always prepares the food, the one who organizes the visits, the one who remembers every practical detail. We can become so grateful for what someone does that we forget to be interested in how someone is.
Then, when he needs to stop, everyone is surprised.
Perhaps we could begin asking sooner. Perhaps we could make room for a tired person before exhaustion forces the question upon us. Perhaps we could believe that rest is sometimes an honest responsibility rather than an interruption of faithfulness.
What We Can Release
The life of a community cannot be measured only by what it successfully continues.
Sometimes its health appears in what it can release.
A gathering may have been helpful for many years. A particular arrangement may carry beautiful memories. Yet the needs of the people can change. Families grow. Bodies age. Work becomes demanding. What once made companionship possible may now occupy the time in which companionship could happen.
We should be able to notice this without feeling that gratitude has been betrayed.
The room served us. The arrangement served us. The familiar hour served us. Their usefulness was real. They can be reconsidered with the same love through which they were first established.
There is nothing inherently lifeless about a regular hour or a familiar place. A spontaneous occasion can be self-conscious, and an ordinary Sunday gathering can be full of tenderness. The question is whether our arrangements remain available to the people they are meant to serve.
Can we change a plan because someone needs care? Can we leave a little space without immediately filling it? Can we discover that an unhurried meal has accomplished something our discussions of fellowship had failed to make possible?
We may need fewer opportunities to demonstrate participation and more opportunities to be known.
Affection That Gives Room
I think, too, about what happens when someone needs distance.
Perhaps the person is weary of explaining himself. Perhaps a conversation has become a recurring argument. Perhaps he needs quiet in which to discover what he believes without constantly anticipating someone else’s response.
We can be concerned without turning concern into pursuit. We can offer companionship without making every kindness an invitation to resume the old arrangement. We can ask what would help and accept that the answer may not be what we hoped.
There is a particular tenderness in being remembered by someone who no longer needs anything from us.
A brief message. A shared meal. A question about the family. Affection that survives our reduced usefulness can help us believe something we may have struggled to receive through years of teaching: that we are loved as persons.
Surely our life together should make that easier to know.
The Same Question in Me
None of these observations gives me a superior place from which to evaluate everyone else. I can turn simplicity into a standard as quickly as another person turns activity into one. I can prefer silence so strongly that I become impatient with a talkative brother. I can speak of freedom while wanting everyone to accept my understanding of it.
The familiar temptation remains with me even when I have changed my preferences.
So I do not think the answer is to create a more subtle form of spiritual accomplishment. We do not need to become experts at appearing unprogrammed. We do not need another accepted manner, this time quieter and less formal. We need room for Christ’s life to reach the places where we are still protecting ourselves, including the need to be recognized as people who understand life.
That work may be very ordinary.
I may need to listen without correcting. I may need to admit that an explanation I have offered for years has not helped this particular person. I may need to apologize without adding a lesson. I may need to let someone choose differently and discover that affection can remain.
These are places where the words become less easy, because something of our own security is involved.
Perhaps that is where the old language can become living again. We no longer use it to complete an expected contribution. We begin to recognize its meaning in the costly, tender business of sharing life.
Grace becomes more than a word when someone need not earn his way back into our affection. Fellowship becomes more than a subject when we remain beside a person whose difficulty has no quick answer. Humility becomes more than a teaching when we can be corrected without making the other person pay for correcting us.
The life was never absent from Christ. He has not become less sufficient because our habits have become crowded. We can turn our attention to Him without first condemning our entire history or defending every part of it.
We can be grateful. We can be honest. We can release what has ceased to help.
Room to Breathe
And perhaps, the next time we sit together, we will feel less urgency to prove that something spiritual is happening. Someone may speak. Someone may remain quiet. A familiar hymn may become precious again. A question may interrupt the expected direction, and we may have enough room to hear it.
We may leave without an impressive account of the occasion. Yet someone who arrived guarded may have spoken honestly. Someone who arrived exhausted may have felt permitted to rest. Someone whose words have always come easily may have discovered the sweetness of listening.
This is not a new method or a more refined form of spiritual achievement. It is the slow clearing of space: space for Christ to meet us beneath our explanations, for one another to become more than our assumptions, and for love to remain when usefulness, certainty, and fluency fall away.
The life we have spoken about for so long has never been absent. It has been waiting in the ordinary places—in the apology without a lesson, the question we do not rush to answer, the silence we do not fear, the affection that does not need to manage anyone.
Perhaps that is enough for us to remember: we do not make Christ present by finding the right words. We learn to notice Him when the words no longer need to carry everything.
And in the quiet that follows, the room becomes wide enough for someone to breathe.
