I Cannot Hear What I Keep Explaining

She has taught that passage nine times in four years and she can do the whole thing without notes.

She knows where the group will go quiet. She knows the sentence that always produces the same question from somebody, and she has three ways of answering it depending on who is asking. She knows which verse to slow down on and where somebody will look up.

On a Tuesday in the spring she opened it for herself. Not to prepare. She was tired and it is a passage she loves and she wanted it for herself, at her own table, with nobody coming.

She got four verses in and caught herself thinking about where the group usually gets stuck.

She started again.

Six verses in, and she was constructing the bridge into the second half.

She started again, and by the third attempt she was watching herself start again, which is worse than either of the first two, and she shut the book and sat there.

Here is what she has not been able to say to anybody, and she is the person other people say things to.

She cannot hear it any more. Not that passage. She can teach it beautifully, and she does, and people are genuinely fed, and she goes home from those evenings knowing that something happened for other people in a room she was standing in.

She is the one it does not happen to.

And she has begun to wonder, in a way she does not like, whether that is the price of the work, and whether she has quietly agreed to it.

They read distinctly, and gave the sense, and stood in the same room

Sit down with the book shut for a minute, because there is a verse in Nehemiah that shows you a whole day of exactly your work, and there is a detail in it that answers your Tuesday.

The people have asked for the book. It is read out in a square from morning until midday, and there are men going through the crowd while it is read.

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

Gave the sense. That is your job description and it has not changed in two and a half thousand years.

Now here is the detail. Read what happens at the end of that day. The whole assembly weeps, and then they are told not to, and then they go away to eat and to send portions and to make great mirth.

The whole assembly. Not the crowd while the explainers stood at the side with their arms folded.

The men who gave the sense were in that assembly. They were standing in the square when the book was read, they heard it as everybody else heard it, and they went home and ate and sent portions with everybody else.

Hear this at your own table. You are not outside what you hand out, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture puts the ones who gave the sense inside the same congregation, and the Holy Spirit does not run two channels, one for the room and a thinner one for the woman at the front.

Now let me name what happened on Tuesday, because it was not deadness.

You read four verses and your mind produced the group. That is not a sign that the passage has gone; it is a sign that a very well trained system did the thing it is trained to do, at speed, without being asked.

You have built, on purpose, over four years, a reflex that turns text into teaching. That reflex is a gift and it feeds people. It is also on all the time, and you have never once told it to stand down, because nobody told you it could.

Hear this too, and let it stop the suspicion. This is not the price of the work, and Scripture is what says so. What is written keeps the ones who gave the sense inside the assembly that heard it and inside the feast afterwards, and the Spirit of God has not been giving you a professional relationship to His word in exchange for other people's breakthroughs.

And now the practical part, and it is not a technique for feeling something.

The reflex fires on preparation cues. A notebook. A pen. The particular chair. Your own handwriting in a margin. Those are the starting gun, and they are so ordinary you have never noticed them, and the written word and the Holy Spirit are entirely unbothered by any of it.

So take them away, and take them away physically, not by intention, because you cannot intend your way past a trained reflex.

Shut the notebook. Put it in another room. Sit somewhere you do not prepare, with nothing to write with anywhere in reach, and read it out loud.

Out loud matters. Reading aloud uses the mouth and the ear rather than the eye and the pen, and the reflex has almost no grip on it, which is why they read the book out loud in that square for five hours.