Curtis writes them on the back of feed receipts, because that is what is in the truck.
Monday morning, before it gets light, he reads a bit at the kitchen table with the dog asleep on his boot. And most weeks nothing much happens and that is fine. But every so often a question comes up out of the page, a real one, the kind that sits in your chest like you have swallowed something cold.
And what Curtis does with it, and has done for about twenty-six years, is write it on the back of a receipt and put it in his shirt pocket to ask on Sunday.
He has a good man to ask. That is the thing. Curtis is not stuck with nobody. He has a pastor he respects who has never once made him feel foolish, and he will stand in the hall after and get an honest answer and not a brush off.
The trouble is what happens to a question between Monday and Sunday.
By Tuesday afternoon it has cooled off. By Thursday he has to read the receipt to remember what he meant. And by Sunday morning, standing in that hall with a coffee in a paper cup, the thing that felt like swallowing something cold on Monday has flattened into a sort of general enquiry, and he hears himself ask it in a smaller voice than the one it came in, and he gets a good answer to a question that is no longer the one he had.
And he goes home fed and not fed.
He worked it out this spring, and the reason he worked it out is that he lost one.
Big question. Monday. It had teeth in it. He wrote it down and the receipt went through the wash in his shirt on the Wednesday, and by Sunday he could remember that there had been one and could not remember what it was. He stood in the hall and did not ask anything.
And it bothered him for a fortnight, and what he finally said out loud to the dog was, I have been posting things to Sunday for twenty-six years.
He is not lazy. He is not disrespectful of the man who teaches him. He simply decided, somewhere back around the time he was a young man, that a question that comes up in a kitchen at half five in the morning is not a thing you deal with in a kitchen at half five in the morning. It is a thing you take to somebody.
So Monday has never once been the day anything opened. Monday is the day he collects.
And I would guess you have your own shirt pocket, and yours may be a note on a phone or a list you keep for a conversation you are always about to have.
Somebody was appointed to be there on Monday
Let me take one thing off you before anything else, because you have been hauling it a long time and it is not yours.
You are not on your own with a page and you never have been. Scripture says plainly that a Guide was given for exactly this, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the calendar, who leads a person into what a text is saying. Set that down at the tailgate. You have been carrying it since you were a young man and it does not belong to you.
Now hear who was appointed, because Jesus is very specific about it and He says it the night before He dies, which is when a man says only what matters.
But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth.John 16:13
Notice who is doing the guiding. And notice who He is talking to. He is not talking to trained men in a school. He is talking to fishermen and a tax collector in a borrowed room, and He is telling them that after He goes, they will not be left with a book and no help.
The Guide is not on a rota. He is not available Sundays between eleven and half twelve. He was given, and He lives in you, and that is written and it is not a figure of speech.
You have Him. At half five on a Monday, in a kitchen, with a dog on your boot. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one Jesus named for this exact work, and He was there the whole time you were writing on the back of the receipt.
Now I want to be careful here, because there is a ditch on this side of the road and I have seen men drive into it.
Your pastor is a gift. The ones who teach are given for the very same reason: so nobody is left to work it all out alone with their own opinions for company. A man who decides he needs nobody ends up certain and small and usually wrong in some way he cannot see, and I would not put you within a mile of that.
Take your questions to him. Keep taking them.
The thing that has gone wrong is not that you ask. It is that you wait, and something in a question dies in the waiting, and the answer you finally get is fitted to the corpse of it.
So the change is not who you ask. It is when you start.
You are able to begin on Monday. Right there at the table, before it is light, with no notes and no apparatus at all. His word says the Spirit of truth guides into all truth, and He is the one in you, and He does not need the week to warm up.
And the honest half, because you would want it plain. Twenty-six years of posting things to Sunday has not made you humble. It has made you dependent in a way that has quietly taught you your own kitchen is not a place where God says anything, and that is not true and it has cost you a great many Mondays.
So here is where we land, and it is nothing heavy.
Tomorrow morning, when something comes up out of the page, do not write it on a receipt. Ask it out loud, right there, at the table, of the One who was given to guide you. Then read the page again slowly.
That is the whole of it. Nothing else changes. You still stand in that hall on Sunday and you still ask your man your questions, and if you get no answer at the table you have not failed a thing and nothing has been withheld from you.
You have a Guide. Not one day, and not when you have earned better standing. Now, this minute. His word names Him the Spirit of truth and says He guides into all truth, and His Spirit is in you at half five in the morning in a cold kitchen the same as He is anywhere else.
I am not going to tell you what will come, or when, or whether tomorrow will be one of the mornings something opens. That is God's, and He answers in His own way and in His own timing, and I will not put a promise in His mouth to round a page off. What I will tell you is what is already yours, and what is already yours is a book put into ordinary hands and a Guide put into ordinary men.
Ask it on Monday, while it still has teeth in it.
Declare this over yourself
Say these sitting at your own table, out loud, before it gets light. Nothing here is a task and nothing here has to be earned; it is already yours in Christ, and it was yours through every one of the twenty-six years. Scripture is what these lines stand on, His Spirit is the one who makes them live, and the outcome is His, answered in His own way and in His own timing.
- Shirt pocket, you have carried good questions to their death and you are not carrying another one. In the name of Jesus I empty you at this table, because this book was put into my hands on purpose and it speaks to me directly.
- Notion that God says nothing in my own kitchen, you are twenty-six years old and you have not been true for a single morning of them. Scripture says the Spirit of truth guides into all truth, and a Guide who lives in a man is not a man who waits till Sunday.
- Lord, You gave the Guide the night before You died, to fishermen in a borrowed room, and Your Spirit is the one who does the leading. The page is mine to read and the question is mine to ask, and I am asking it out loud on a Monday.
John 16:13
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