They Call Me When Nobody Knows What It Means

Tomás gets the phone call about an hour after something happens, and he has never once arrived and said nothing.

It is not an official role. It grew. Somewhere in his forties he became the person a family in that neighborhood sends for when the thing that has happened cannot be understood: a death that came out of nowhere, a diagnosis, a son who has gone, a marriage that fell over in an afternoon.

He arrives, and the chairs are already pulled round, and there are eleven people in a front room, and they look up.

And he says something.

He is sixty-four now and he can tell you honestly that he has never in twenty years walked into one of those rooms and not produced a sentence that helped. Not one time. Whatever was needed, he found it, and the room settled, and somebody put the kettle on.

That is the thing he has begun to examine.

Because a proportion of those sentences, he now thinks perhaps a third, were not given to him. They were assembled on the drive over. He knows these families. He knows what has been going on in them for decades. He can construct, in eight minutes at forty kilometers an hour, something true and warm and load-bearing enough to hold a room together for a night.

And it works. That is the difficulty. It has never once not worked.

He has never asked himself what he is being paid in, and the answer, when he finally looked at it, is that he is paid in the moment the room comes down off its feet. Eleven faces going from that to this. That is what he has been earning for twenty years, and it is not money and it is not thanks and it is stronger than either.

You may know that drive.

Maybe you are also sent for. Maybe you also assemble on the way. And maybe you have never once asked what is buying your sentences.

What he did first

There is a man in Daniel summoned on precisely your reputation, into a room that is falling apart, and what he does before he says a word about the meaning is refuse the reward.

I have heard of thee, that thou canst make interpretations, and dissolve doubts.Daniel 5:16

That is the summons. Note the phrase: dissolve doubts. That is what you are called for, in exactly those words, and it is what you have done twenty years running.

And here is what he says back, before anything else: Let thy gifts be to thyself, and give thy rewards to another; yet I will read the writing unto the king.

He takes the payment off the table first.

Not because payment is wicked, and not to make a point about humility. He does it because he is about to say something to a room and the room is watching him, and a man who is going to be paid for an answer is a man with a reason to have one.

He uncouples the two before he opens his mouth, and only then does he speak. And what he says, when he says it, is not comfortable, and it does not settle the room at all.

Which means the first move in that scene is not finding the meaning. It is removing whatever would make him need to find one.

And the first move is taking the payment off the table. The written word has him refuse the reward before he reads a word, in a room that is falling apart around him, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who brings that to a man who has never once arrived and said nothing.

And He gives the meaning as well as the words. The word puts both halves in God's hands throughout that chapter, and the Spirit is the one who supplies them rather than requiring a man to build one on a drive.

What is actually buying the sentences

Now the accounting, because you have started it and you should not have to finish it alone.

You are not being paid in money and you would be insulted by the suggestion. You are being paid in the drop. That instant when eleven people who were holding themselves rigid let their shoulders down, all at once, in a room you walked into.

That is one of the strongest things a person can be given, and you have had it hundreds of times, and no man alive is neutral about a thing like that.

And it arrives about four seconds after you speak. Which means the reward for having an answer is immediate, and the cost of not having one would be paid instantly and in public, in a room full of people you love.

Nobody could wait under those conditions. Not you, not me, not anybody. It is not a weakness of character; it is what happens when a payment lands that fast, and you have been standing in that incentive for twenty years without ever once naming it.

And what has been moving you is a reward rather than a lie. The word says the fear of man bringeth a snare, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a mechanism rather than an accusation of a man who came every time he was called.

And nothing about you is under review for twenty years of arriving. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who has never told those families a single thing he did not believe.

And nobody is telling you to stop going

Let me be plain, because you are already picturing not answering the phone and that is not what any of this is.

Nothing here says stop going. Go. Keep going. Being in the chair is most of it, and half of what you have given those rooms in twenty years was your presence and not your sentence, and they would tell you that themselves.

And nothing here settles anybody's practice or rules on what should happen in any gathering, because that is not this page's business.

What is on offer is the sentence you have never once said in one of those rooms: I do not know what this is.

Said sitting down, with your coat still on, staying the whole evening. That is not less than what you have been doing. It is the same care with the manufacture taken out.

And you are permitted to arrive with nothing and still be the one they called. The word has him refuse the reward and stay in the room and speak anyway, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a permission rather than a retirement.