The Twenty Minutes You Cut

The best evening Nabil ever taught was the one where he lost twenty minutes to a broken heater and had to cut a third of it on the spot.

He has thought about that evening for four years and he has never been able to say what happened in a way that satisfies him, because the obvious explanation is one he does not accept.

The obvious explanation is: it was better because there was less of it.

He does not accept that, and he is right not to, because he has taught short evenings since deliberately and they were not that. He has cut material on purpose twice, in a slightly experimental frame of mind, and both times it was fine and unremarkable.

So it was not the length.

Here is what he can reconstruct. When the heater went and everybody moved rooms and he found himself twenty minutes down, he did something he had never done, which was decide in about four seconds what the evening was actually for.

Not what it covered. What it was for.

And having decided that, he could see instantly which parts were serving it and which were there because they were interesting, or because he had spent a long time on them, or because leaving them out felt like admitting something.

He cut the interesting ones. He kept about six minutes of the hardest material in the whole thing, which he had privately expected to lose first, because it turned out to be the part the evening was for.

And a woman stayed behind afterwards and asked him a question he has not forgotten.

You have your own version. There was a session that went unaccountably well and it is not the one you would have predicted, and you have never worked out why.

Nobody here is going to tell you to teach less. That would be a stupid instruction and it is not what happened that night.

But there is a verse about what a room is for that explains the four seconds, and it does not ask you to give up a single thing you know.

The clause at the end is the whole assignment

There is a description in Nehemiah of the first recorded teaching session after the exile, and the sentence has three parts and the third is doing the work.

So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.Nehemiah 8:8

Caused them to understand.

Notice that it is a third thing. Reading distinctly is one. Giving the sense is two, and that is real interpretive work, the kind a person spends years learning to do.

And then there is a further clause, and it is about a change in somebody else. The measure is not in the text and it is not in the explanation. It is in the room.

Which means, and this is the whole of it, that the assignment has an object, and the object is a person, and everything else in the sentence is instrumental to that.

And the aim of what you do sits in the room rather than in the material. That is not my reduction: the written word puts a third clause after reading and giving the sense, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man who has been puzzling over one evening for four years.

And nothing in that verse asks you to know less. Gave the sense is in the middle of the sentence and it is not optional, and the Spirit is the one who lets a person hold depth and direction together rather than trading one for the other.

What the four seconds actually did

Here is what happened when the heater broke, and it is worth naming precisely because it is repeatable and has nothing to do with length.

Nabil normally arrives with a body of material and delivers it. The material is the plan. What the evening is for is implicit, and because it is implicit it never has to compete with anything.

That night the material could not all fit, and so the question what is this for became explicit for the first time, and once it was explicit it acted as a filter.

The filter is the thing. Not the cutting. The cutting was a consequence.

And notice what survived: not the easy parts. He kept the hardest six minutes, because when you ask what an evening is for, difficulty stops being the criterion and relevance takes over, and some hard things are extremely relevant and some easy ones are not there for anybody at all.

And you are not being asked to dilute anything. The word keeps gave the sense in the sentence alongside causing to understand, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a matter of direction rather than depth, which is the difference between teaching for a room and teaching down to one.

And what you love about this is not the problem. The word says study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth, and it commends the labor rather than tolerating it, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit about the years you have put in.

Nobody is telling you to cut a third every time

I want that plain, because a message like this can turn into a rule about length within about a paragraph.

The broken heater was not a method. Cutting a third on purpose will not reproduce that evening, as Nabil has already discovered twice, and if you go in on Thursday determined to lose twenty minutes you will simply teach a shorter version of the same thing.

The repeatable part is the question, asked before you build rather than after.

What is this evening for? Not what it covers. What it is for, in the room, for the people who will actually be sitting there.

That question will sometimes produce a shorter evening and sometimes a longer one, and once in a while it will make you keep the hardest thing you have and drop the charming thing you were most looking forward to.

And you have what you need to make it plain. The word says the anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you, and teacheth you of all things, and the teaching is His work in the hearers as well as in you, and the Spirit is the one who does the causing to understand that no preparation can manufacture.