He Will Not Be Here Much Longer

You are learning this against a clock and nobody will tell you what is on the face of it.

That is the exact shape of it. The doctors have said what doctors say, which is honest and careful and gives you no number at all. The family has its own estimate and nobody says it out loud. And you are sitting up at night with a list of words, doing arithmetic you have no figures for.

How many words a week. How many weeks. Whether the two numbers will meet.

And underneath that there is a worse one, which is the question of whether any of it will arrive in time to be worth anything, or whether you will end up at a funeral with three hundred words in your head and nowhere to put them.

I want to say the true thing before anything useful.

That fear is not irrational and I am not going to treat it as though it were.

You may not get there. That is a real possibility and it stays a real possibility for the whole of this article, and if I removed it in order to encourage you the encouragement would be worthless by Thursday.

So I am not going to tell you to make every moment count. That sentence is a weight, and you are carrying enough.

Make me to know mine end

There is a prayer in Psalm thirty nine that almost nobody prays on purpose.

LORD, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am. (Psalm 39:4, King James Version)

Make me to know mine end.

Now the first thing to see is that somebody asked for this. It is not a lament about not knowing. It is a request, from a man who wanted the number, and the psalm records him asking for it out loud.

You are not being unfaithful by wanting to know. Scripture has somebody asking for exactly the same thing.

You have been wanting a number that a man in the psalms asked God for directly, and wanting to know has never once been a failure of trust. Psalm 39:4 puts that request in a prayer rather than in a rebuke, and the Holy Spirit is the one sitting up with a man and a list of words.

Now stay on what he says the number is for, because it is not what anybody expects.

That I may know how frail I am. He is not asking so that he can plan. He is not asking in order to allocate the remaining time efficiently, and there is no project in that psalm that the number would let him finish.

He wants to know the size of a man. That is all the number is for.

You have been asking for a number in order to plan and the psalm asks for one in order to be honest, and a man who knows his own size has never once needed the date as well. The Holy Spirit is the one who gives a man an accurate sense of himself without giving him a calendar, and Psalm 39:4 puts the frailty rather than the planning at the end of the request.

And here is the third thing, which is what the psalm does not contain.

An answer. He asks, and the number does not come, and the psalm goes on without it. The request is recorded and left standing unanswered, which is the honest account of what happens to everybody who asks that.

You have asked something that was left unanswered in scripture itself, and a question that gets no number has never once been a question nobody heard. Psalm 39:4 is followed by no figure at all, and the Spirit of God is the one with a man doing arithmetic he has no numbers for.

Every word works the day you learn it

Here is the practical half, and it is the correction the arithmetic needs.

This has been getting treated as a delivery. A quantity of language assembled over months and handed over at some point in the future, which either arrives in time or does not.

That is the wrong model and it is the source of the whole fear.

Every word you learn is usable the day you learn it. Not at the end. Tonight, if you go and sit with him, with whatever is in your head at nine o'clock this evening.

You have never once been building toward a delivery date, and a word learned tonight has never once had to wait until the end to be spent. The Spirit of God is the one with a man sitting up with a list, and Psalm 39:4 asks for the measure of a man rather than for a schedule.

Now here is what that means about the months you have already done, which you have been counting as preparation.

They were not preparation. They were the thing. Every visit since you started has had more in it than the visit before, in a way neither of you has been tracking, and that has already happened and cannot now be lost by anything that occurs later.

The account is not settled at the end. It has been settling all along.

You have already spent months of this rather than saved them, and a thing already given has never once depended on what happens afterward. Psalm 39:4 receives a request and leaves it unanswered without the asking being wasted, and the Holy Spirit is the one who knows what has already passed between two men.

And here is the thing about the funeral, said plainly, because you have pictured it and it is worth answering.

Three hundred words in your head at a funeral is not a waste and it is not a failed project. It is the shape of a man who spent the last months of somebody's life learning to speak to him, and that is what it will have been regardless of how far you got.

The words are not the point and never were. The going toward him is.

You have been doing something whose worth was never in the outcome, and months spent going toward somebody has never once been undone by how it ended. The Spirit of God is the one who sees what is actually being done at eleven o'clock at night with a list of words, and the written word leaves a man's request for a date standing without an answer.

Say one sentence this week

So here is the assignment, and the timing is the whole instruction.

Say one prepared sentence to that person, and let the rest of it be in English.

This week. With tonight’s words rather than the ones that are coming in March.

One sentence, in his language, said to his face. Not the best one you could eventually build. The best one available on Thursday.

You have a sentence available this week rather than a better one later, and the words in your head tonight have never once been worth less than the ones that were coming. Psalm 39:4 asks for the measure of a life and never once receives a figure, and the Holy Spirit is the one in a room with a man and a shorter list than he wanted.

And here is what to do with the rest of the visit, which matters as much.

English. All of it. Talk about whatever the two of you talk about, at whatever length, in whichever language moves.

Because one sentence in his language is not a performance you have to sustain, and trying to hold a whole visit in it would cost you the visit. The sentence is a single true thing said in the language he was a boy in, and then two men talk about the car.

Then stop, because one sentence is the assignment, and there is another week and if there is not, this one counted.

You have permission to say one and then go into English for an hour, and a single sentence has never once been a smaller gift than an hour of them. The Spirit of God is the one in that room on Thursday, and Psalm 39:4 records an honest request and then goes on without the answer.