Sixty Years Of Something More

Hollis gets home from the second service at about ten past twelve, hangs the good coat on the hook by the door, and sits down in the chair by the window without taking his shoes off first.

It is January. The light through the net curtain is that thin winter gold that comes in flat and low and does not warm anything. The gas fire ticks. Ina is in the kitchen and he can hear the oven door.

On the arm of the chair there is a spiral notebook with a rubber band around it and a pen pushed through the wire. He has kept one of those since he was twenty. Sixty years of them, in a box in the closet, sermon dates and headings and the three points and the verse, written in a hand that has gotten smaller and shakier and still slopes the same way.

This morning's was good. That is the thing. It was a good sermon by a good man who has buried Hollis's people and sat up nights with him twice, and there was not one wrong word in it.

It was about walking in the light. It ended, the way they end, with a question about whether we are really doing it. Whether we have let it become routine. Whether there might be one more step of obedience we have been holding back on.

Hollis wrote the three points down. He always does. Then he clicked the pen and put it through the wire and sat there.

Sixty years. Sixty years of good men asking him whether there might be one more step. He has taken the steps. He taught the boys' class for nineteen years. He drove the church van until his eyes went. He gave the money and he went on the visits and he prayed at the hospital bed of a man who did not like him. He has taken every step anybody ever named from a pulpit.

And this afternoon, in the chair, in the flat January light, what he feels is not conviction. It is not rebellion either. He would like it to be rebellion, because at least that would be interesting.

It is just tired. A tiredness that has settled exactly where the joy used to be, the way water finds the low place in a floor.

He has never once said that to anybody. What would he even say. That the preaching is too good. That every one of those men was right.

Ina comes in with a cup and puts it on the side table by his elbow and does not say anything, because after fifty four years she can read a room from the doorway. She sits down on the other chair with her own cup.

The gas fire ticks. The light moves an inch along the carpet.

Read the tense before you read the list

Everybody knows the verse. It is on plaques and on the backs of bulletins and it has been read over you a hundred times.

But almost nobody reads the two verses in front of it, and the two verses in front of it are the whole reason it exists.

Micah has a man in the dock, and the man is doing exactly what you have been doing. He is escalating. Shall I come with burnt offerings, he says. With calves a year old. Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams. With ten thousands of rivers of oil. Shall I give my firstborn.

Listen to him. That is a man who has been told there is something more, and he has run out of ideas, and he is bidding higher and higher against himself in an empty room. By the end of it he is offering his own child, which is what the escalation always comes to in the end, one way or another.

And then comes the answer.

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?Micah 6:8

Look at the first three words before you look at anything else. He hath shewed thee. It is past tense. Completed. Done and handed over already, before the man started bidding.

The whole verse is not the beginning of a program. It is the end of an auction. God is not saying here at last is the list. He is saying stop, you already know, I told you a long time ago and it was never the enormous thing you have been trying to work up to.

You have already been shown, and it happened long before this tiredness set in. Micah 6:8 puts it in the past tense on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is not shy about reading an old line to a man who has been in church for sixty years and thinks he has heard everything in it.

And notice who is not being blamed in this passage. Not one of the preachers who asked you whether there might be one more step was doing you harm. They meant it kindly, they were usually right, and most of them were as tired as you are and did not have anywhere to put it either.

The three are a manner, not a project

Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly with thy God.

Read them again and notice that not one of them is an event. There is nothing there to schedule. There is no number attached to any of them and no way to be behind on them, because none of them is a thing you complete.

They are the way a person goes about a Tuesday. Do justly is how you deal with the man at the counter. Love mercy is what you are like when somebody is wrong. Walk humbly is a walk, which is the plainest, slowest, most unremarkable verb in the whole sentence, and it is the one God chose to finish on.

Sixty years of driving a van and teaching a class and sitting with people is not a man failing to walk humbly with God. It is what walking humbly with God looks like when it is stretched out over a life instead of squeezed into a testimony.

You are already walking in the thing you have been trying to qualify for. That is His word and not my encouragement, kept in Micah 6:8 where anybody can check it, and His Spirit does the rest without needing your permission to be kind about it.

Here is what I am not doing. I am not handing you a gentler list. If this were the part where the three big requirements get swapped for three small manageable ones, it would be the same machine with quieter gears, and you would be back in the chair in a month.

There is no list here at all. There is a verse in the past tense and a man being told to stop bidding.

It is already settled, and it was settled before you started keeping notebooks. Scripture put the showing in the completed tense and left it there, and the same Spirit who moved the prophet's hand is sitting in the front room while the fire ticks.