They Got It And You Kept Going

Emilio found out at minute nineteen that it had landed at minute four, and the fifteen minutes in between are the subject of this.

He was explaining something to a group of about nine. It is a thing he understands well and has explained many times, and there is a particular part of it that people find difficult, and he had built up to that part carefully.

A woman near the front got it at minute four.

He knows the exact moment now, because she told him afterwards. Something he said in passing, not the carefully built part, an aside really, and it went in and moved and rearranged something, and she sat with that for the next quarter of an hour.

He did not notice. He was mid-explanation and looking at the middle distance the way you do, and he went on and did the careful build and delivered the difficult part and it was good.

She heard none of it. She was still at minute four.

And afterwards she said something warm and slightly stunned about the aside, and Emilio said thank you, and then went and sat in his car and thought about fifteen minutes.

Not because he wasted them. The other eight people were there and several of them needed the build.

It is that for fifteen minutes he had been in a room with somebody in whom the thing had already happened, and he had not known, and he could have.

There were signals. He is sure of it now, retrospectively, and cannot name one of them.

You have your own version. It landed, and you found out later, and there was a stretch in between where you were talking and somebody was somewhere else entirely.

Nobody here is going to tell you to watch faces more carefully. That advice produces a teacher who is monitoring instead of teaching.

But there is a moment in Luke where two men who were there did not know what had happened until afterwards, and it is oddly comforting.

They only worked out what had happened when He had gone

There is a sentence at the end of the road to Emmaus, and the tense in it is the interesting part.

And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures?Luke 24:32

Did not our heart burn. Past tense, said afterwards, by two people who were present for the whole thing.

They did not know at the time. That is the plain reading. Something was happening in them for a considerable walk, and they were the ones it was happening in, and it took His disappearing for them to be able to name it.

Which tells you something enormous about the moment a thing lands: it is very often not legible to anybody in the room, including the person it is landing in.

So the fifteen minutes are not a failure of attention on Emilio's part. The woman herself could probably not have described what was happening at minute six.

And you are not required to detect the moment it lands. That is not my excuse-making: the written word has two people missing it in themselves while it was occurring, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man sitting in a car after a good evening.

And the aside was not an accident you should have planned better. The word says a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold, and fitness is about the moment rather than about the preparation, and the Spirit is the one who does the fitting rather than the one preparing.

What was actually available in the fifteen minutes

Now the honest half, because there is something here and it is not detection.

Emilio could not have known she had it. But there was a smaller thing available, and it is the thing this whole category keeps arriving at.

He could have stopped.

Not to check faces. Simply to leave a gap: a stop, a breath, one question into the room, at any point in that quarter of an hour. And in a gap, a person who is somewhere else has room to come back or to say something, and a woman who is quietly rearranging her whole understanding has somewhere to put a hand up.

The build was good and the difficult part was necessary. Both true. And fifteen unbroken minutes is a long time for a room to have no exits in it.

And the room is what you are serving. The word says causing them to understand, and the causing happens in the hearers rather than in the delivery, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit about what the aim is.

And you do not have to carry the outcome. The word says God gave the increase, and the increase is His verb, and the Spirit is the one who lets a man stop auditing whether the thing worked and simply leave doors in the wall.

Nobody is telling you to monitor the room

I want that plain, because the obvious application is watchfulness and watchfulness ruins teaching.

A teacher scanning faces for signs of landing is not present. Everybody can feel it, and it turns a room into an audience being assessed, and the assessing is worse for them than fifteen unbroken minutes.

And do not go and ask people afterwards whether it landed. Some of them will not know for a fortnight, as the two on that road did not know for a walk.

The available thing is the gap, and a gap is made by removing something rather than by adding vigilance.

And what happened in her at minute four is not yours to have caused. The word says the anointing teacheth you of all things, and the teaching is His work in a person, and the Spirit is the one who was doing something at minute four while a man was mid-sentence and looking at the middle distance.