The Hour Before the Conversation

He got here an hour early on purpose and he cannot now remember what the purpose was.

The bench is under a tree at the top of the road, forty yards from the house. It is wooden and the slats are warm from the whole afternoon of sun on them, and the light coming through the leaves is moving on the path in front of his shoes in that way it does, slow, gold, not in any hurry at all. Somebody's bicycle is leaning on the fence across the road. Two neighbors are talking down at the corner and one of them laughs.

At six he is going to sit in that house and say a true sentence he has not said in two years.

He has already said it. That is the trouble. He has said it about forty times since he parked, in forty different rooms that do not exist. In one of them she goes quiet and looks at the floor and the quiet is the worst thing that has ever happened to him. In one she says I know and he cries, which he has not done in front of her since he was nineteen. In one she gets up and puts the kettle on in the middle of it, which is somehow the version he can least bear. In one she says the thing about his father and he answers badly, and he has now rehearsed the answer four times to get it right, an answer to a sentence nobody has said, in a conversation that has not happened.

His hands are cold. It is twenty degrees out here and his hands are cold.

He has looked at his phone eleven times. Fifty minutes. Forty-four minutes. He is not actually waiting for six o'clock. He has been at six o'clock for fifty minutes, over and over, from every angle, and the bench and the tree and the gold light on the path have been going on around him the entire time and he has not been in any of it.

And underneath all forty versions is one flat sentence he would not say out loud to anybody. By the time I get in there I will have nothing left.

The leaves move. The bicycle has a rusted chain guard. Down at the corner the neighbor laughs again at something.

Forty-one minutes.

The ration is issued to what is happening

Let me name it before I say one word about strength, because you will not name it kindly and the forty rehearsals certainly will not.

You are not weak for this. You have run one hard conversation forty times in fifty minutes, and every single run cost you something real. That is not nerves. That is fifty minutes of actual labor, done standing up, with no water and no shade, and at the end of it you are genuinely emptier than you were when you parked, and then you have looked at the emptiness and concluded something unpleasant about your character.

Nothing is wrong with you. You have been working extremely hard at a thing that has not happened.

Now here is the line I want under you.

It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22-23

Two Hebrew words carry that, and they are almost the same word. We are not consumed is the word for coming to an end, being finished, being used up. His compassions fail not is the same idea turned around and pointed at God: they are not at an end. So the line says, plainly, that the reason a person is not finished is that God's supply is not finished. The two are tied together, and the knot is the whole verse.

And then look at how it is issued. New every morning. Which means it comes the way manna came: enough, on time, and not stockpiled. You cannot draw next week's. You could not draw tomorrow's if you tried, and men who tried found it spoiled by the following day.

Here is what nobody says about that, and it is the thing you need on this bench. You have mercy issued to this hour, and it is issued to the hour you are actually in and not to the one you keep visiting. That is Lamentations 3:22 and its own next line, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a written ration and puts it in the hands of a man sitting under a tree with cold hands at twenty degrees.

There is no grace drawn down for six o'clock while it is ten past five, because at ten past five six o'clock does not exist. It has no bench and no chair and no room in it. It is not a place God has to supply, because nobody is standing there.

You are being supplied for a bench, a tree and forty-one minutes, and you were never issued rations for a room that does not exist. The written word ties your not being finished directly to His compassions not being finished, and the Spirit of God is the One who makes that a felt thing in a body rather than a nice sentence about somebody in Jerusalem.

Forty conversations, and none of them is the one at six

So look at what has actually been consuming you, because it is not the conversation.

The conversation has not started. It has no words in it yet. Whatever is going to be said at six is currently unsaid, by both of you, and it will take, what, twenty minutes? Half an hour? You have done fifty. You have done fifty minutes of the hardest thing in your week, forty times over, and every one of those runs took a real toll on a real nervous system, and not one of them is going to happen.

Not one. Not the quiet one. Not the kettle one. Not the one where she says the thing about your father, and not your four rewrites of the answer to it. The room at six will be its own room, with its own air in it, and it will surprise you in ways none of the forty did, because rooms with actual people in them always do.

You are not the man who has to survive forty conversations, and you were never asked to be. Lamentations 3:22 says the reason a person is not used up is the supply on the other end, and His Spirit is the One who lets a man set down thirty-nine rooms that were never built.

And I am not going to widen this out for you. I have nothing to say about how six o'clock goes. I do not know and I would not pretend to, and if I told you it will be fine I would be handing you a forty-first version to carry. What I have for you is now. The slats warm under your hands, the light moving on the path, the bicycle with the rusted chain guard, forty-one minutes.

You have strength for the hour that has a bench in it, and it is His and already given. That is what new every morning means when it is put in the present tense, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a written ration into a body that has been standing in a room forty times since it parked the car.

When six o'clock comes, six o'clock will have its own supply, issued then, to a man actually standing in a doorway. Not now. Now is for the bench.