Ninety Accurate Seconds

She can do it in ninety seconds and she has timed herself, which tells you something.

Aisha is twenty-nine and she is very good at this. Somebody at work asked her in the summer, honestly and without an agenda, what the actual message is, and Aisha gave it to her: clear, warm, no jargon, ninety seconds, and the woman said oh, right, and looked thoughtful, and it was one of the better conversations of Aisha's year.

She walked back to her desk and felt, unmistakably, nothing.

Not empty. Not guilty. Just nothing, in the way you feel nothing after describing your route to work.

And she sat down and opened her laptop and a thought arrived sideways, which is how the important ones come, and it was: when did that last happen to me?

Not when did she last say it. She says it several times a year and she says it well.

When did it last land on her.

She has been going back over it since and the honest answer is that there was something at a carol service four years ago, in the middle of a reading she has heard three hundred times, where she suddenly could not sing the next verse.

Four years.

And in between, she has explained it accurately to at least a dozen people, and she has never once been the one it arrived at.

She is not in crisis. She would like that to be clear, mostly to herself. She believes every syllable of the ninety seconds and could defend all of it and does not think any of it is untrue.

It is simply that a thing you can produce on demand stops arriving. You cannot be surprised by something you keep in a drawer, and she has been keeping it in a drawer, well organized, ready to hand to anybody who asks, for about four years.

And you may know that desk. You may have your own summary, and it may be a good one, and you may not be able to date the last time it happened to you.

The oldest summary in the letters is delivered as an announcement

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have been carrying it since the summer and it was never yours.

You are not cold. You never were. Scripture hands over the oldest summary of this in the shape of news rather than in the shape of a syllabus, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your capacity to be moved on cue, who makes it arrive in a person. Set it down here on the desk. It is heavy and it has been under the laptop since July.

Now hear the oldest version of it in the whole New Testament, and notice how Paul introduces it.

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day.1 Corinthians 15:3

What I received I passed on.

He is a courier. That is the posture in the sentence and it is worth stopping on, because it is not a teacher's posture.

And look at the content. Three events, in the past tense, with dates and a burial and witnesses listed straight afterwards. Died. Buried. Raised.

There is not one instruction in it.

It is the shape of a message brought from somewhere else about something that has already happened. That is why he says of first importance, and that is why the whole thing can be said in ninety seconds without leaving anything out, because news is short and instructions are long.

You are somebody it was passed on to. Not only somebody who passes it on. Right now, at your desk, at twenty-nine, on an ordinary afternoon. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who makes it live, and He did not hand it to you on condition that you keep being moved by it.

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

Nothing here says the ninety seconds are a problem or that being able to explain it well is a symptom of anything. It is a gift and it is a service, and a woman at work heard something true because of it, and Scripture is entirely in favor of clear passing on.

And nothing here says the four years mean something is wrong with you. Feeling is not the measure of anything and never has been, and a person can be walking closely with God through years with no discernible weather in them at all.

The point is only that you have not been the recipient in a while, and you noticed, and noticing is not a fault. Scripture puts you at the receiving end first, and His Spirit is the one who brings anything to it.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is kind about it. What you are actually missing is not an emotion, and His Spirit knows exactly what it is.

It is being the one who is told. There is a particular thing that happens when news arrives at you rather than through you, and you have been the courier for so long that you have not stood where the woman at work was standing for four years.

Scripture has Paul saying what I received, which means he was on that end first, and His Spirit is the one who does the arriving, and neither of them ever required you to arrange it.