Past the Card

Danielle's alarm goes at ten to six and the card is the second thing she looks at.

She has done it for six years without missing more than a handful of days, which is more consistency than most people manage with anything. The card comes up with the day's verse on a soft background, and she reads it, and often she sends it to her sister, and twice a week she puts it on the family group and her mother replies with three hands raised.

It is not nothing. It has got her through a redundancy and a bad winter.

But on Tuesday the card had a verse on it that had a therefore in it.

And Danielle looked at that word for a second, because a therefore means the sentence is the second half of something, and for the first time in six years she had a clear and specific thought, which was: therefore what?

Her thumb went to the little arrow that opens the chapter.

And she did not press it.

She looked at it, and she thought about how long a chapter is, and she thought about the fact that she would probably not understand the first half of it anyway, and she thought, quite distinctly, that is not really for me, that is more of a Bible study thing.

And she closed the app and got in the shower.

She has thought about that moment several times since, because she is not a woman who backs off things. She runs a shift. She has raised two boys mostly on her own. Nobody who knows her would use the word timid about her in any other part of her life.

But there is a line, in that app, between the card and the chapter, and she has stood at it every morning for six years, and it turns out she believes there is a qualification you need to cross it.

Nobody told her that. That is the strange part. Her church would be delighted if she read a whole chapter. Nobody has ever suggested she was not up to it.

She built the line herself, out of a few things: a bit at school, a comment somebody made once, and years of hearing people explain passages so well that she quietly concluded she would need to be able to do that in order to be allowed to read one.

So she takes one verse a day off the top and never once eats the meal it was cut from.

And you may be standing at your own version of that line, and you may have been standing there long enough that it feels like the edge of your ability rather than a fence you put up.

He did not sip them, he ate them

Let me take something off you before we go one step further, because you have been holding it for six years and it was never handed to you.

You are not required to be able to teach a chapter before you are allowed to read one. You never were. Scripture is given to be eaten, not to be qualified for, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your ability to explain it afterwards, who feeds a person out of a page. Put that down right now. It is heavy and it has kept you on a card.

Now hear how a man who was having a genuinely terrible time described what the words did for him.

When your words came, I ate them; they were my joy and my heart's delight, for I bear your name, Lord God Almighty.Jeremiah 15:16

I ate them.

Not I studied them. Not I understood them. Not I was equipped to handle them. He ate them, the way you eat when you are properly hungry and there is food, and the result named in that verse is joy and delight, which is not the language of an examination. That is what stands written, and His Spirit is the one who carries the plate.

And look at the reason he gives at the end. Not because I was trained. Because I bear your name. That is the whole qualification, and it is the one you already have.

You have that. Right now, on the bus, with a phone in your hand, in the middle of an ordinary week. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who does the feeding, and He has never once checked anybody's credentials at the top of a chapter.

Now let me be careful, because there is a ditch here too.

The people who teach are a genuine gift. Somebody spent years on the language so that you could hold it in yours. The ones in your church who explain passages are not your problem, and a woman who decides she needs nobody and reads only what she likes, alone, with nobody to sharpen her, ends up somewhere thin. That is real and I am not sending you there.

But listening to somebody explain a meal is not eating it. It never has been. And what has happened, without anybody intending it, is that six years of excellent explanations have taught you that the food arrives pre chewed and that raw chapters are for other people.

Here is the tender part. You are not incapable. You are hungry and polite.

You have been standing at the edge of your own table waiting to be asked. Scripture says the words came and he ate them and they were his delight, and the same Spirit who breathed them is the one at your shoulder at ten to six, and He was not waiting for you to be qualified. He was waiting for you to be hungry out loud.

And the honest half, because it is the one that changes a morning. Six years of one line a day is faithfulness and it is also six years of never finding out what therefore was there for. You will not die of it. But you have been eating off the top of a plate you were given whole.