The Chapter I Skip Every Year

Ari keeps a plan. He has kept one since he was nineteen, and he gets through it most years, and the years he does not he starts again in the spring without any drama about it.

And every year, at roughly the same point, he goes round.

There is a section he does not read. He does not skip it dramatically. He does not tear anything out. He simply gets to it and finds that he has a great deal on that week, and by the time things settle he is somehow four days further along, and the plan does not mind and nobody has ever noticed and he has not read those chapters as an adult since the year he decided not to.

He can tell you the exact conversation, which is the strange part.

He was nineteen, in somebody's front room, and an older man he liked and respected had used a passage from that section in a way that landed badly on somebody in the room who was already having a hard year. It was not malicious. It was clumsy, and it was public, and Ari watched a person's face while it happened.

And that evening, walking home, he came to a private conclusion, the way nineteen year olds do, and the conclusion was: that part is a weapon, and I am not going to be a man who uses it.

Which is not a bad instinct. Something in that is genuinely good.

But he made a decision about a large piece of God's word in a single evening at the age of nineteen, on the basis of watching one man use it badly, and he has been executing that decision for twenty-two years without ever revisiting the ruling.

He has buried a parent since then. He has sat up two nights with a friend who was not going to be alright. He has been wrong about something important and had to say so out loud. He is not the man who walked home that night, and he is not remotely the man who would need protecting from those chapters, and he has never once gone back to see what is actually in them.

He noticed it properly last winter because his nephew asked him a question about that very section, and Ari heard himself answer from memory, from schoolboy memory, and knew as he was speaking that he was describing something he had not looked at with adult eyes.

And I suspect you have your own detour, and yours may be a book or a stretch of chapters or one particular story, and you may be able to name the year you passed the verdict.

What He sends out does not come back with nothing in it

Take this off before we go on, because you have carried it twenty-two years and it was never given to you.

You are not the appointed protector of anybody, including yourself, from the word of God. You never were. Scripture says of itself that what He sends out accomplishes what He sends it for, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your careful routing, who governs what a page does in a person. Set it down at this table. It is heavy and it has cost you a section of your own inheritance.

Now hear how the word describes its own errand.

So is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.Isaiah 55:11

Read the errand carefully, because the sentence is about His purpose, not about ours.

He sends it. It does what He sent it for. It does not come back with nothing in it.

That is a promise about the word's own reliability, and it means the misuse you watched at nineteen was a misuse of something whose actual errand was not what that man made of it. A hammer used to hurt somebody is still a hammer, and the house still needs building.

And that word is for you. All of it, including the part you go round every spring. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who governs the errand, and He did not send some of it out to bless and some of it out to harm.

Now let me be careful, because there is a ditch on this side of the road and you are exactly the sort of man who would drive into it out of good motives.

You were right to be troubled that evening. What you saw was real and it hurt somebody, and the instinct not to be a man who does that is a good instinct and you should keep it. And the ones who teach you, the ones who have spent their lives on the hard sections, are worth listening to precisely here, because the difficult parts are where a person reading entirely alone can get it wrong quickest and hardest. Scripture is not shy about its own hard chapters and His Spirit is patient with a man inside them.

Read those chapters with your teachers. Read them slowly. Read them in company.

The problem is not caution. It is that caution turned into a permanent detour, and a detour taken every year for twenty-two years stops being caution and becomes a map.

Here is the tender part. You have been protecting a nineteen year old who no longer exists.

You are not that boy in that front room. Scripture says His word accomplishes what He sent it for, and the same Spirit who breathed those chapters is in the man you have become, the one who has sat up those nights and buried what he has buried, and He is not handing you a weapon.

And the honest half, because you would want it. Answering your nephew from schoolboy memory is what a detour costs. Not damage. Just a smaller table than the one you could have set for him.