News Before It Was a List

Ray's daughter rang on a Thursday and said, Dad, he asked me and I said yes.

And Ray said, right. What do you need me to do.

There was a pause on the line. Not a long one. Just long enough that he heard it, and then she laughed and said something warm and they talked for twenty minutes and it was fine, it was lovely, and he put the phone down on the arm of the chair and sat there.

What do you need me to do.

His daughter had rung him with the best news of her life and his first sentence had been a request for the task list.

He has been like this for a while, and he can see the mechanism perfectly. Twenty-eight years in a job where every message that arrives is an action. Nothing comes to Ray at work that is simply information. Everything is a thing to be done, by him, by Friday, and he has become extremely good at that, and his whole reading apparatus is now built for it. A sentence arrives, he strips it for the verb, he files the verb.

The trouble is that it does not switch off at the door.

He does it with his wife. She says something about her sister and he starts working out what to arrange. He does it in the queue at the doctor's. And he does it, he has slowly realized, with God.

He could not tell you the last time he heard something about God that was not also a job.

Every message is about what he ought to be doing. Every talk has a shape he could draw for you before it starts, and the shape ends with three things to apply. Every conversation with a certain kind of person leaves him with a small quiet debt. He is not being got at by anybody. Nobody in his church is heavy-handed and most of them are kind. It is simply that his ears now do the same thing to a sermon that they do to his inbox, and they strip it for the verb, and the verb is always his.

So the whole thing has become a very long list that he is behind on, and he has been behind on it for years, and the tiredness of that is a specific kind. It is not the tiredness of hard work. It is the tiredness of never once being told anything that did not immediately become his responsibility.

He sat in the chair after the phone call for about ten minutes.

And what surfaced was not guilt about his daughter, though there was some of that. It was something older and further down and much more painful, and it arrived as a question he had not asked in a very long time.

When did any of this stop being news.

And you know that question, because you have your own version of it, and yours may be quieter and older still.

You believe it. You have never stopped. You could not tell me the last time it landed on you as something that had happened rather than something that was required.

The word underneath all of it means an announcement

The word that gave this whole tradition its name never meant a set of standards. It meant good news, and news is a very specific kind of sentence.

News is about something that has already occurred. That is what makes it news. Nobody runs into a room out of breath to announce a policy. A herald does not arrive with suggestions. He arrives because a thing has happened somewhere else, at somebody else's cost, and the people in the room had nothing to do with it and are about to be affected by it anyway.

That is the shape. Something happened. It has been done. Here is what it means for you.

And listen to where Paul puts the timing, because the whole weight of the sentence is in one small word about when.

But God shows His love for us in this: that while we were still missing the mark, Christ died for us.Romans 5:8

While.

Not once we had. Not as soon as we started. Not on the understanding that we would. While. In the middle of it, with nothing improved, with no undertaking given by anybody, with the situation exactly as bad as it was.

Nobody was consulted. Nobody was asked to contribute. The thing was done at a distance from us, on a day we had no part in, and the announcement came afterwards.

That is why it is news and not a requirement, and it is why the order can never be reversed. You cannot earn your way into a thing that already happened. You are two thousand years too late to help, and that is not a failure on your part, it is the design, and His Spirit is the one who makes that land in a person.

Now hear where the ache goes, because this is the part people miss. The word has since been used for a great many things, and some of them have made you tired. But when the people who carried it hardest were carrying it, it did not produce a list. It produced a life. There were men and women who heard this news and then spent forty years getting the trade in human beings abolished, and they did not do that in order to qualify. They did it because you cannot hear that God came for people while they were still in the wrong and then go on treating anybody as cargo.

The news came first, and the cost came out of the news, and never once the other way round.