By Tuesday It Was Gone

Her son asked her on the Tuesday and Yvie could not answer him.

He was not being difficult. He is fifteen and he had not come, and he asked the way you ask a person about a film they saw without you: "What was it about, then?"

And Yvie stood at the sink with a pan in her hand and got absolutely nothing.

Which is astonishing, because on the Sunday she had cried. Properly cried, in the second half, and she had put her hand up at one point without deciding to, and she had told two people in the car park that it was exactly what she needed and she had meant every word.

Forty-eight hours.

She got as far as, "It was about how God, um." And then, "Something about not giving up." And then she said, "It was better than that sounds," and laughed at herself, and the boy said "Right" and went upstairs, and Yvie stood there feeling something she did not want to name.

She has been in church thirty-one years. That is more than sixteen hundred Sundays. She could not tell you what four of them were about.

She said all of that to her aunt on the Wednesday, in the shop, in the aisle with the tinned tomatoes, because that is where these conversations happen.

And her aunt did not tell her to take notes.

She said, "What did it make you want to do?"

And Yvie said, straight away, with no thinking at all, "Ring my sister."

And her aunt said, "Then it is not gone anywhere, baby. It went in."

And then she said the thing that changed how Yvie listens.

"But you never put it in your own mouth. You heard it in his mouth, and you felt it in your chest, and it never once came out of you in words you would use. And a word you have not said out loud has got nowhere to live."

Now let me ask you the same question I would ask her.

What was the last one about?

Not the feeling. The content. And if you are standing there with a pan in your hand getting nothing, do not read that as a verdict on you. It is a missing step, and the step is small, and it is in the Bible.

They translated so the people understood

There is a scene in Nehemiah that ought to be famous and is not, and it is a scene about exactly this.

The people have come back from exile, and most of them no longer speak the language the book is written in, and Ezra stands on a wooden platform from early morning until midday and reads it out.

And then look at what the Levites do.

They read from the book, from the law of God, translating to give the sense so that they understood the reading.Nehemiah 8:8

Translating to give the sense. They went out among the people and put it into the language those people actually spoke, and the verse names the goal in plain terms: so that they understood.

Not so that they were moved. Understanding was the target, and Scripture treats it as worth an entire day of a nation's time.

So hear this over you, standing at your sink. You are able to understand what God is saying to you, in your own words, and the fact that it will not come back on a Tuesday is not evidence of a shallow heart. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is named again and again as the one who teaches and reminds, which means the reminding is not resting on the quality of your memory.

Now let me give you the step your aunt gave Yvie, because it is the whole message.

You have to say it back, in your own words, out loud.

Not write it down. Not underline it. Say it, in the words you would use to explain it to somebody at work, and hear it come out of your own mouth in your own voice.

Here is why that is not a study technique but a spiritual reality. A thing you have only received is still in the other person's language. It sits in you as their sentence, their emphasis, their cadence, and their story about their uncle. It is a beautiful borrowed coat and it is not the right size for anybody but them.

The moment you put it into your own words, it becomes yours. Not the truth, that was always His. The possession of it.

That is why you can remember what a message made you want to do and not what it said. The wanting was yours. The words were his.

You have been fed for thirty-one years and you have been fed well, and the written word says the Spirit will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance what Christ has said, so nothing that went in has been wasted. And that same Spirit does His teaching in the language you actually think in, which is why a sentence you say back in your own accent tends to still be there in a month.

Let me guard the preacher, because I love them and I am one.

None of this is about a person who preaches too high. Some of the best food I have ever had came in language far above my own vocabulary, and I would not have it dumbed down for anything.

The missing piece was never on his side of the room. It was the ninety seconds afterward that nobody ever teaches you to take.

There was a man five hundred years ago who spent a whole life on one conviction: that people should have it in the language they argue and cook and bargain in, because a truth you cannot say is a truth you cannot keep. He was not against learning. He had more of it than almost anyone alive. He simply refused to let the learning be the gate.