The Part Where I Always Pause

Isaac Mahoe has given the same testimony at the harbor chapel anniversary for twenty years.

Three minutes. He has it down to three minutes because Auntie Lorna times the program off her own watch and she is not sentimental about it.

He knows where the laugh comes. It comes at the truck with no reverse gear. He knows where the room goes quiet, and it is his father's face, forty seconds in. And he knows the pause. Right before the last half minute there is a pause, four beats long, long enough that a visitor always thinks he has lost his place, and then he says it: "And that was the night I stopped running."

Twenty Februaries. Same folding chairs. Same borrowed microphone with the gray tape wrapped around the stand. Same smell of teriyaki coming through the double doors from the kitchen while he talks. He could do it in his sleep and some years he has half suspected he did.

This February a boy came up to him afterward while he was stacking chairs on the rack. Nine years old, maybe ten, holding a paper plate with two spoons of macaroni salad still on it.

"Uncle," the boy said. "When you do the pause. Does it still feel like anything?"

Isaac said, "Of course it does."

Then he put the last chair up, drove home along the water with the windows down, said goodnight to his wife, and lay in the dark until two in the morning, because that was the first lie he had ever told inside that building.

He could not remember. That was the whole of it. He could remember the events fine, and recite them with the pauses in the right places. But the thing that had come through him at nineteen, out on the breakwater with the swell knocking under the rocks, the thing that had made him a different man before the sun came up, he could not lay a hand on it. He had told it so often that the telling had worn a groove, and somewhere down in that groove the thing itself had gone quiet, and he could not tell you what year.

He got up. He did not want to wake her, so he sat at the kitchen table with only the light over the stove on.

Here is the part he still has trouble explaining. He did not go looking for the feeling. He had run that search a hundred times, in the truck, at the sink, standing at his father's grave, and it came back the same way every time, which was inconclusive.

Instead he took down the book his mother put in his hands when he was nineteen, the one with the cracked spine and the water stain across the bottom corner, and he found the page. The page the whole three minutes stands on. The one he quotes without opening anything, the way a man says his own phone number.

And he read it. Slowly. Like a man reading a contract he signed young and had never once looked at since.

Not to see whether he felt it.

To see whether it was so.

He sat there while the light came up gray over the water and the gecko on the window screen went about its business, and he read the page, and then the page around the page. The feeling did not come back. Nothing came back.

But by six he had the coffee going and he was standing at the counter with the book open and one finger on the line, saying it out loud to an empty kitchen, and it was not his testimony he was saying.

It was the thing his testimony had always been standing on.

What the noble ones went and looked at

Paul comes into Berea off a hard night in Thessalonica and he preaches. And Luke, writing it down afterward, does something you would not expect. He praises the people who did not simply take Paul's word for it.

These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.Acts 17:11

Now look hard at what they searched.

Not themselves. The Scriptures.

That one distinction is the whole message, and it is the difference between twenty years of exhausting yourself and one morning at a kitchen table. Those people were not auditing their own hearts for evidence of sincerity. They went and looked at the text, daily, to find out whether the thing they had been handed was actually so.

And Luke calls that noble. Not suspicious. Not cold. Not backslidden. Noble.

So hear this over you: you are not disloyal for wanting to know. That hunger under your ribs is not the first stage of drifting, it is the readiness of mind Scripture praises, and you are carrying it right now. I am not offering you my kind opinion of your own heart. It is written of people who went and checked, and the Holy Spirit who moved Luke to write the words "more noble" is the same Spirit who has kept you awake over a child's question.

And now the part that quietly takes the weight off you. You have been searching the wrong document. Twenty years of going down into your own chest with a flashlight, hunting for the heat you had at nineteen, and the search comes back inconclusive every time, because you are the one thing in that room you cannot read honestly. God never asked you to run it.

You have been checking the wrong record, and you are free to stop this morning. The word did not go anywhere while you were away looking for the feeling. The written word says the grass withereth, the flower fadeth, but the word of our God shall stand for ever. Feelings are grass. They are good grass, God made them and He is not embarrassed by them, and they wither on schedule. The Spirit does not bear witness to your goosebumps. He bears witness with your spirit to what Christ finished, and He has been doing it faithfully on every flat morning you thought nothing was happening.

A groove is what happens to a road that gets used. Twenty Februaries of telling the same true thing to the same people who love you is not a sign the road went bad. It is a sign there was traffic on it.

That story of yours is true. It was true the first February and it is true this one, and the wearing of it is not the wearing out of it. You are not a fraud in that room. His word says His compassions fail not, they are new every morning, and the Holy Spirit who met a nineteen-year-old on a breakwater is not a memory you are supposed to reconstruct. He is a Person, and He is at the table with you while the coffee goes cold.

Let me stop saying him now, because the man at that table is you.

You know the three minutes. You know the particular loneliness of hearing a room go quiet at exactly the place it always goes quiet, feeling absolutely nothing, and then stacking the chairs afterward like a person who has just finished a job.

What was handed to you is not on trial here, and neither are you. You have your own eyes, your own morning and your own open book, and the searching you have been ashamed of is the very thing God calls noble. That is not my encouragement laid over your life. Scripture puts the two together in a single sentence, received and searched, the open hand and the open book, and the Spirit of truth is the One who was leading you into it long before you understood what the restlessness was.