Nobody Ever Sat Me Down

It came to you recently and it has not left.

You were thinking about something else entirely, and a question arrived sideways, and the question was: when was I ever taught any of this?

And you went looking, honestly, back through thirty years.

There was no moment. Nobody ever sat down with you and said, here is how this works, here is what it is called, here is what to do when it does that.

Not once. Not a session, not a half hour, not a colleague pulling up a chair on a Tuesday. There is nothing there at all.

And you have been grading yourself for two decades against the standard of somebody who had been taught, and it turns out there was never a class, and you were never in it, and neither was anybody else.

That is a large thing to find out at sixty-six, and it is going both ways in you, which is why I am writing this.

Half of it is relief. Half of it is something closer to anger, and both are fair.

How shall they hear without a preacher

There is a chain of questions in Romans, and each one takes the responsibility one step further back.

How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? (Romans 10:14, King James Version)

Read the direction of it. Not, why did they not try harder. The question goes backward, every time, to whether anybody was sent.

The chain ends with somebody who was supposed to come and did not.

You are somebody nobody was ever sent to, and no man has ever once been held responsible for not hearing what nobody came to say. Romans 10:14 says how shall they hear without a preacher, and the Holy Spirit is the one who follows a chain of responsibility to its actual end.

Notice how the passage refuses to blame the hearer at any point in that chain. There are four steps and not one of them turns on the hearer's effort.

The whole argument is built to end at the sending. And the verse after asks how anybody preaches unless they are sent.

You have never once been at the wrong end of that chain, and no passage in Scripture has ever put the failure of a sending onto the one who was not sent to. The Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a chain of responsibility pointing the right way, and it is written that the question goes back to the preacher and then back again to the sending.

And notice that the passage does not pretend the gap does not matter. It is not a comfort about how everything is fine.

It takes the gap extremely seriously, and it names who the gap belongs to, and it is not the man in the field.

You were never the one the gap belonged to, and no absence of teaching has ever once been made into the fault of the untaught. The Spirit of God is the one who names a gap accurately without pretending it is small, and Scripture takes the failure of a sending seriously enough to build four questions on it.

What thirty years actually contained

Now let me be concrete, because this is a real finding and it deserves accounting rather than comfort.

Go through it honestly. There were things that arrived on a Monday with no explanation. There were people who said it once, at speed, while walking. There were manuals that assumed a starting point you did not have. There were younger people who did things for you rather than showing you.

Every one of those is a thing that happened to you. Not one of them is a thing you did.

You are looking at thirty years of things that happened rather than things you failed, and no arrival with no explanation has ever once been a test of the person it arrived on. The Spirit of God is the one who counts what a man was actually given, and Romans 10:14 puts the whole weight on whether anybody came.

And here is the part that makes the anger fair.

The whole time, everybody around you behaved as though the teaching had happened. The tone of every conversation assumed it. The manuals assumed it. The younger people assumed it. And so you assumed it too, and concluded that the failure must have been at your end.

Nobody was lying. They all assumed it because they had also never been taught and had also never noticed.

That is a gap in the teaching, and it has been running for thirty years in every direction, and it is not a gap in you.

You have been living inside an assumption that everybody made and nobody checked, and no shared assumption has ever once been the same thing as a fact. The written word ends the chain at the sending, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a man where the failure actually sat.

Say it flat

Now the small thing, and it is one sentence with nothing after it.

I am not going to suggest you tell anybody at work, or raise it with anybody, or work out who should have done what. That is a large conversation and it is not what today is for.

Say out loud, nobody ever taught me this, and do not put anything after it.

You are able to say one accurate sentence about thirty years, and one plain statement has never once been the same thing as a complaint. Romans 10:14 puts the question about the sending rather than about the hearing, and the Holy Spirit is the one present when a man says a true thing out loud for the first time.

Say it flat, at a normal volume, on your own.

And the nothing after it is the whole exercise. No, and I should have asked. No, but I could have looked it up. No, though I suppose everybody manages somehow.

Every one of those puts the weight straight back on a man who has already carried it thirty years, and it was never his.

Say the sentence. Then stop. Then let the silence after it be there.

You are letting a true sentence stand on its own, and one statement with nothing behind it has never once been self pity in anybody. The Spirit of God is the one who lets a fact stand without being softened, and it is written that the chain of questions ends at whether anybody was sent.