The Letter I Have Written Four Times

The first draft was on paper. The other three have been on a laptop, and one of them is still open in a tab that Nadeem has not closed since March.

It is about a thing he cares about more than almost anything else in his life. It is not a hobby and it is not an interest. It is the thing that puts him in a bad mood in the car when he thinks about it too long, and it has been there since he was twenty-four, and he is thirty-nine.

He is good with words. That is not the problem.

The problem is the last inch.

He gets to the end of a draft and something happens to him that he has now watched four separate times and has never once been able to interrupt. He reads it back and it seems suddenly enormous and also somehow too small. He thinks about the person it is addressed to and imagines the reply, or worse, the absence of a reply. He thinks this will not change anything. He thinks about how long the whole thing would take if it did work, which is years, and possibly not years he will see the end of.

And then he goes and does something else.

Six years, four drafts.

The strange part, and it is the part that has begun to frighten him, is that he can feel the caring itself getting quieter.

Not gone. He would still argue with anybody about it. But the version of him at twenty-four could not sleep over this, and the version of him at thirty-nine can sleep perfectly well, and he has noticed that and he does not like what he has noticed.

He thought for a long time that the answer was to feel it more. That is why he reads about it. That is why he goes to things. He has been trying to get back to the heat of twenty-four, on the assumption that if the fire returned, the letter would send itself.

It has not worked, and in March he understood why, sitting in his car outside his own house with the engine off.

The fire is not the engine. The fire was the ignition. It got him started, once, fifteen years ago, and it was never designed to run a fifteen year machine, and he has spent six years waiting for a spark to do a flywheel's job.

And you may know this exactly. You care about something genuinely enormous, and you have never once stayed with it past the week the feeling wore off, and you have been diagnosing yourself as somebody who does not care enough.

The verse assumes you will get tired, and says one thing about it

Take this off before we go any further, because you have carried it in the car for six years and it was never yours.

You are not a person who does not care enough. You never were. Scripture assumes weariness in the people it is speaking to and never once treats tiredness as evidence of a bad heart, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the temperature of your feelings, who sustains anything that lasts. Put that down at this table. It is heavy and it has been the wrong diagnosis for six years.

Now hear the sentence, and notice what it takes for granted.

Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.Galatians 6:9

It does not say do not get tired. It says do not become weary in doing good, which is a sentence written to people who are already tired and are still doing it. Nobody warns a fresh person about weariness.

And look at what is asked. One thing. Do not give up.

Not feel it. Not burn. Not recapture anything. Continue.

That is a completely different assignment from the one you have been failing, and it is the one actually written down.

You have what that asks for. Right now, at thirty-nine, in a cooler season, with a tab open since March. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who keeps a person at a work over years, and He has never once run on your enthusiasm.

Now here is the part I want to place gently, because it is where the whole thing turns.

There were people once who spent forty years on one wrong. Not a season. Not a campaign. Forty years, with committees that failed and votes that went the other way and long stretches where nothing whatsoever moved and the whole thing looked like a hobby for a small group of unfashionable people.

What is worth knowing about them is not that they were passionate. Passionate people were everywhere.

It is that they had a structure that outlived the passion. They met. They kept records. They divided the work so no one person carried it. They were still going after the excitement of the early years had entirely gone, because they had built something a bored, tired, middle aged person could keep doing on an ordinary Tuesday.

You have been trying to run on the ignition. Scripture puts the harvest at the proper time and puts the whole condition in three words, if we do not give up, and His Spirit is the one who supplies what a long work needs, and none of that is measured in heat.

And I will say the honest half, because you would want it. The four drafts were not failures of nerve. They were all written in the heat, and heat writes a letter and never sends one, because sending is a Tuesday task and heat does not do Tuesdays.